Calculus of IT - Episode 33 - 9/25/2024 - "The Next-Gen IT Paradigm - Part 1"

This is Part 1 of a 2-part series on the future of the "IT Paradigm."  In Part 1, Mike and Nate, along with their two special guests Kevin Dushney and Joel Nichols, set the stage for how we arrived at this moment in time for the "corporate IT function" and the IT Leadership historically needed to run the show.  You cannot begin to explore the future of the IT Paradigm until you can understand how it has evolved over the last 25 years or so to where we are today.  Join us next week, as we explore Part 2 where we take a look at the future and what the possible new paradigms will look like.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introductions and General Banter
• 22:39 Nate and Company get into the shit on the context for the IT Paradigm

Transcript

Nate McBride 00:01 
Well, let's move on. 

Kevin Dushney 00:03 
You just had to have them on the recording. Okay. 

Mike Crispin 00:06 
I had to get it in there. 

Nate McBride 00:08 
I mean, there's like good things to go to in Boston, but no matter what every time you drive home from something in Boston, it could be coming home at 11 o 'clock at night from regret it. 

Kevin Dushney 00:18 
maintenance. They're working on the bridges at 11 o 'clock tonight. 

Nate McBride 00:22 
I'm going to shut down three cores of the pike to change the light bulb. Ah, welcome to episode never need her. 

Kevin Dushney 00:33 
Like, are you, are you, uh... 

Nate McBride 00:34 
Exactly. No. I don't know. Well, welcome to episode 33 of the internet crimes podcast. He tweak. We take another look at the absolutely outrageous criminal and illegal bullshit going on in the digital world of ours. 

Nate McBride 00:50 
And we solve the crime right before your eyes. Think you know who is stealing your data? Wondering who is complicit and making you unable to function without SharePoint? We know the answers. We dig up the fluids all over the ground. 

Nate McBride 01:04 
We find out who done it. 

Kevin Dushney 01:08 
I can't believe you got SharePoint in like within two minutes of starting the recording. 

Nate McBride 01:11 
That's right, a new opener. How's that for a new opener? Not bad. It's like that. Thumbs up? Thumbs down? Yeah. Oh yeah, I like it. Internet crime is... I'm hoping I don't like that. Okay. Sloots. I mean, it's basically true, right? 

Nate McBride 01:25 
I mean, we're solving just like one big technology crime and just pieces. 

Joel Nichols 01:31 
Yeah, I think any I think AI strategy is a tech crime right now. 

Nate McBride 01:36 
We all know who did it, right? I mean, we're basically going to give away the answer. Mike, do you know who did it? Just ask AI. Kevin, do you know who did it? No, I don't. Joel. 

Joel Nichols 01:49 
No. 

Nate McBride 01:50 
Okay, you guys are being very quiet. We all know who did it. It was Jeff Bezos. But anyway, so 

Kevin Dushney 01:57 
I haven't seen any Jeff Bezos news so I... 

Nate McBride 01:59 
or Sam Altman, or could have been, I don't know, whoever did the slime attachments. So anyway, tonight we have two very special guests with us. Back with us is Kevin Dushny and our new guest, Joel Nichols. 

Nate McBride 02:16 
And Kevin, I guess the reputational damage wasn't as bad as I thought, considering you are back with us. So obviously that we have no audience or everyone forgot. 

Kevin Dushney 02:28 
I resigned to the fact that there's no such thing as bad press. 

Nate McBride 02:31 
That's good point. Even though I'm not a celebrity. Kevin, remind our audience where you're from and what you do. And Joel, why don't you give us the highlight of your CV. You can just put it in Gen AI and ask it. 

Kevin Dushney 02:46 
Summarize my background. Here's my resume. I am currently at Kymera Therapeutics, coming up on year four. Whoa. Yeah, I know. It's tenure these days in biotech. So that contrasted with the fact that this is my eighth biotech, which is an interesting juxtaposition. 

Kevin Dushney 03:06 
It started off like lengthy tenure, low, and now this one's four years. Targeted protein degradation. So their, you know, early years was de -risking the platform. You know, this year alone, we announced a really exciting, it's public, new target that targets something called STAT6. 

Kevin Dushney 03:33 
And we're very excited about, it's basically our objective is to fix it in the pill. So in a shitty market, you know, Kymera has been able to raise, you know, half a billion dollars and two raises already this year to fund, you know, the development of this and then march it into the clinic. 

Kevin Dushney 03:51 
So, you know, honestly with what's going on in biotech, pretty excited about where the company is and we'll see it in five years. So we wouldn't do anything else, though. 

Nate McBride 04:06 
got me beat by one. I just did a count. I met my seventh company year at eight. So let's see what Joel's got. Joel, what do you got? 

Joel Nichols 04:12 
Yeah, yeah, I better think about that as well. I, yeah, it's probably about eight, I don't want to try to do the math real time, though. So, yeah, I'm jeez, 25 years in all life sciences, I mean, got a med device company in there, got kind of a supplier in there a little bit, but I still lump it all into biopharma in general. 

Joel Nichols 04:36 
So yeah, and similar to what Kevin's talking about, I mean, I started out 14 years in the same company, and then it's just been decreasing all the time. I'd like that to stop. That's not a no, I'm, I'm doing a little better now. 

Joel Nichols 04:50 
I'm a little over a year at the Sarah therapeutics. Then I head up the digital systems group there, which is kind of giving Kevin the heads up that includes it. I think a lot of times, you know, if you ask the organization, they would kind of think that it's the amount of time spent is equal on on terms of automation and R &D systems and it and reality is there's so much more in it that's beneath the surface to get solved and get right. 

Joel Nichols 05:19 
It's a huge chunk to it. So yeah, 

Kevin Dushney 05:23 
of that alone is a full -time job. 

Joel Nichols 05:26 
And sometimes you just don't, you don't try, I mean. 

Kevin Dushney 05:32 
all happen like all this impact you're making in research through your informatics endeavors like 

Joel Nichols 05:38 
they all want to know what they can do with data on the back end and just need it to be there. Yeah, so it's yeah. Yeah, but yeah, and to Sarah just, you know, maybe just briefly about it. It's, you know, we're a novel gene editing company. 

Joel Nichols 05:54 
We've, again, similar with Kevin saying a tough market, we're doing, we're doing pretty well, reasonably well. I mean, we've, we've been tightening our belts just because it's, it's a prudent thing to do and make sure that we can kind of move ahead toward the clinic. 

Joel Nichols 06:11 
We've got exciting news on the horizon. Nothing I want to publicly disclose without, you know, clearing my little department. 

Nate McBride 06:19 
You can tell us. It's okay. 

Kevin Dushney 06:21 
And then the IP feed instead of the AIP. 

Joel Nichols 06:26 
Yeah, that's right. No, but yeah, that's kind of that's where we're at. And it's, it's exciting times. I mean, we get some big things ahead of us. And, you know, if and when those start to come to fruition, those become the fun challenges we like dealing with an it. 

Joel Nichols 06:42 
I mean, they're challenges. But I like that a lot better than the sharpen the pencil and figure out how to squeeze another 20% off the top line. 

Kevin Dushney 06:51 
either keeping the lights on or contract is just not a 

Nate McBride 06:54 
Joel, have you considered going to the cloud yet? 

Kevin Dushney 06:59 
It's working on a VMR strategy right now. 

Joel Nichols 07:01 
I don't trust the cloud. We keep, we keep, if I can't, yeah. No, if I can't touch all the data on the server that sits under my desk, I don't, I don't trust it. If I can't hug it, I don't want it. 

Nate McBride 07:16 
You gotta get some black tape for your shirt, by the way. We gotta, you gotta cover up that Viva ad that yours probably. 

Joel Nichols 07:21 
wearing I know why didn't realize this are we video is this a video podcast I probably show you to the world oh man I could take a shirt off but that's probably not gonna help your view I wasn't so intelligent rehouse 

Kevin Dushney 07:35 
and I want to. 

Nate McBride 07:37 
This is a PG, uh, YouTube and Mike, how's it going over at microcenter? 

Mike Crispin 07:45 
I sold a bunch of wired mice today. A bunch of wired mice. It was fantastic. We have new keyboards and have rainbow buttons. Yeah. 

Kevin Dushney 07:54 
at the store manager now, Mike, or I'm still... 

Mike Crispin 07:57 
I am I am and we've got new government in the aisles new uh, we got some new candy for everyone if you need some Some candy to stay awake late 

Kevin Dushney 08:05 
program was going to pay big dividends for you. That's excellent. 

Speaker 5 08:09 
well 

Nate McBride 08:10 
Thank you, O 'Reilly, Book of Windows and E4 administration. 

Mike Crispin 08:14 
Yeah, I got my certification, actually. I'm all set. Certification on Notepad++. I'm all over it. I've learned a script in it. I'm doing some great things. New plugins available. New plugins have all open source. 

Mike Crispin 08:27 
Fantastic tool. I've showed everyone. 

Kevin Dushney 08:29 
the Clippy API, so you can do, you know, do 

Joel Nichols 08:32 
your bidding. And, and that'll help a mic if you've got a sale going on scuzzy hard drives, that'll help that computer I got under the desk. I really need some more. 

Mike Crispin 08:41 
Great. That's fantastic. Great. Good search. I got some new search protectors in two Oh, thank god 

Nate McBride 08:48 
Thank God. 

Mike Crispin 08:50 
connection so you can look at the you can look at the the power surge in the you can log into the old Apache web server we've got built in each of the 

Nate McBride 09:02 
that's where we get to our intranet. 

Kevin Dushney 09:05 
Do you mean the one that hasn't been passionate in three years, Mike? 

Mike Crispin 09:08 
Oh, we don't patch anything. Got to keep that open. Less likely to be hacked, no legacy. 

Joel Nichols 09:13 
It's all coded, it's all coded in cold fusion anyway. That's the safest language. CVs you can get. 

Kevin Dushney 09:20 
before it's multi. 

Nate McBride 09:21 
We went to Micro Center nearly every day, if we weren't going to Comp USA after four hours of the miracle, we were walking over to Micro Center and just like, we all had a corporate card. I was like, what do we need today? 

Nate McBride 09:37 
Oh, I need a new video card for my PC or I need these seven books that I'll never read. It was every day adventure after four hours of the miracle, which I remember most of those afternoons, actually. 

Nate McBride 09:49 
No, I don't remember. 

Kevin Dushney 09:53 
Was microsunder where the comp USA was or was that somewhere else? 

Nate McBride 09:57 
center has never moved the comp USA was where the Asgard is now. Okay. Which the Asgard was like it went that building with you like nine restaurants and then the Asgard like dug in and said we're gonna lose money every year but we're not gonna move. 

Nate McBride 10:15 
Right. 

Mike Crispin 10:18 
Wasn't as good as the Austin grill, though. 

Nate McBride 10:21 
The Austin Grill. 

Mike Crispin 10:22 
role is the best. 

Nate McBride 10:22 
We just got free free little buckets of chips there and endless lone stars and then whiskies. And then we would eat like share wings. Mike, what kind of. 

Kevin Dushney 10:32 
kind of like filter do you have going on in your on your 

Mike Crispin 10:37 
Oh, now I just have the background blurred. Okay. Yeah. 

Joel Nichols 10:41 
It zooms in and out. 

Nate McBride 10:43 
like Mike has already got the latest the next gen iPad I laptop thing going on 

Mike Crispin 10:50 
Kevin, I used my Vision Pro for the 9th time this week. 

Nate McBride 10:56 
to do to do what? 

Mike Crispin 10:59 
I was just watching YouTube. 

Kevin Dushney 11:02 
And so it started to hurt my eyes, I got a headache and had to take it off. 

Mike Crispin 11:06 
It's really neat though. I did get the, um, the web, uh, 3d stuff working, which is nice for the reasons. The XDR store, whatever it's called that has the 3d vision through the web. I'm still in. 

Kevin Dushney 11:22 
intrigued by the reactions you got by wearing that on a flight. 

Mike Crispin 11:27 
Yeah, that was cool. That was fun. I had a woman next to me who was scared to die. 

Kevin Dushney 11:33 
You imagine he's sitting next to a guy that's got an apple. 

Nate McBride 11:36 
It would have only been better if you were breathing really hard the whole time you wore it. 

Mike Crispin 11:44 
I was fully relaxed the whole time, trust me, very relaxed. 

Nate McBride 11:52 
Okay. Well, uh, welcome to our guests. Welcome to fall. If you're joining us from the Northern hemisphere, three words for you about fall into England, apple picking is dumb. So stop it. 

Kevin Dushney 12:06 
Don't spend hours in traffic getting all of your donuts. 

Nate McBride 12:10 
You can pay 50 bucks for a small bag of rotten apples and a glass of warm cider and then drive all the way back home, wondering what the number of that law firm is, as you can do your divorce. Just go to Shaw's. 

Nate McBride 12:24 
I love Apple. No, you don't. You don't encourage them. Why? 

Mike Crispin 12:30 
Because I just eat, I just eat as many apps, I could take a bite of an apple, I don't wash it off or anything. 

Nate McBride 12:36 
I should for a week or I just what happens afterwards. 

Mike Crispin 12:40 
Nothing. No. Stomach of steel. I'm serious. It's fantastic. I discovered an apple each time I go. 

Nate McBride 12:46 
just to the ice Twinkie challenge we're going to have an apple eating contest we're just going to watch Mike eat apples until he vomits out of every angle 

Speaker 5 12:57 
No, no, no, no, he's conditioning his body. 

Kevin Dushney 12:59 
the exercise. 

Mike Crispin 13:01 
No, no problems there. 

Nate McBride 13:03 
For those things that are all can converge on still Massachusetts this weekend and shut down the town. Yeah, don't go to Shaw's buy a bag of organic apples for like all bucks. Use the leftover cash to go to the liquor store and get a four pack of sip and then just sit on your couch. 

Nate McBride 13:22 
Eat the apples drink the sip and pretend you had an orchard. 

Kevin Dushney 13:26 
The flaw in your plan is the cider donuts. 

Mike Crispin 13:30 
Love those 

Nate McBride 13:31 
Yeah, but you can get those year round. 

Joel Nichols 13:35 
You know what, they got them in market basket, too. Just saying. I don't know. 

Kevin Dushney 13:38 
I think they're as good as the orchard, personally, but. 

Joel Nichols 13:41 
That's a mental trick. 

Kevin Dushney 13:44 
and stuff. The one on Northboro is good too. Yeah there's like 

Nate McBride 13:48 
all different ones, but everyone thinks that this one is the one, which is, I don't get it. 

Kevin Dushney 13:53 
My one of my my ops team at work is doing an outing and they mentioned that I'm like, why are you guys all going to stuff? They're like, whoa, this is the best I'm like. 

Nate McBride 14:03 
you to win. People hate being here because there's only like two roads in and out. Number one, there's no lights. There's no way to divert traffic. There's no bathrooms. People see people all the time just pissing everywhere in our town during these four weeks. 

Nate McBride 14:18 
It's baffling. Like stay home, watch football, drink some sip. My I was thinking about this, say like, my earliest childhood memories of fall. And I have one in particular, but before I said mine, I'm going to throw it out to you guys, Mike, what's your earliest child memory of fall? 

Mike Crispin 14:40 
Geez, I'll be Halloween related my birthday's in October, so it's probably. 

Nate McBride 14:45 
Listen Rod, don't try to, don't try to plug your birthday right now. 

Mike Crispin 14:50 
Oh, hey, I'm plugging it. 

Nate McBride 14:52 
It's a way to plug your birthday. This is not going for the. 

Kevin Dushney 14:55 
the birthday month. 

Nate McBride 14:57 
Yeah, like we're not even in October. I just asked your memory not like what your birthday was just jumping leaves 

Kevin Dushney 15:06 
Every Halloween, every year. Some of us, I've been out for two weeks already. 

Nate McBride 15:12 
So, so Kevin, Kevin's out your memory. 

Kevin Dushney 15:16 
Um, no, it's not a retail thing. I guess it's just sort of the, the changing of the season. Um, you know, getting colder. I like, I mean, still to this day, like the opening the windows, sleeping at night, uh, being very comfortable. 

Kevin Dushney 15:31 
I remember that as a kid and still enjoy that today. Uh, fire pits, you know, the family. Um, you know, when it's, you know, high fifties, low sixties is, is fun. So remember what that, it's the door. 

Kevin Dushney 15:47 
Oh, sorry. 

Joel Nichols 15:49 
Yeah, I'm torn between two. I think if I have fractions of memories of picking pumpkins and carving them. Carving pumpkins was something good. We used to do that, too. Yeah, but there's also the element of raking leaves and then having an argument with my dad when I'm supposed to rake leaves again in two weeks. 

Joel Nichols 16:08 
I'm like, why don't I just wait till they all fall? Like, if there's still leaves on the shelf. 

Kevin Dushney 16:12 
Now you're dredging up the bad memories, right? Well, I have that. These leaves aren't going to rake themselves. 

Joel Nichols 16:18 
Yeah, but they're not done falling. I'm like, if you can't shake the tree, I'm not touching them. 

Kevin Dushney 16:24 
And my father's favorite saying of a job half done is a job not done. 

Joel Nichols 16:31 
Yeah and that tree's only half done. Exactly. It's got a job to finish. It was it was when I learned about this was a good you know IT predecessor. You learn about what predecessors are and how it's impossible to actually do the job when people give us half -baked requirements. 

Nate McBride 16:48 
My earliest childhood memory of fall is Gartner, 2013. 

Speaker 6 16:54 
Bye! 

Nate McBride 16:56 
OK. 

Speaker 6 16:57 
Oh, that's pretty loaded. 

Nate McBride 17:00 
It all did. 

Kevin Dushney 17:00 
Did you have that joke? Were they already serving you at kimonos at that point or, uh, no cart, no 

Nate McBride 17:07 
That's the last fall I remember in my lifetime. I can't remember before that because of, because of 2013. So that's where I kind of cut the line. I'm sure there was like a great Halloween somewhere before that, but I don't remember it because of that weekend kimonos. 

Nate McBride 17:23 
So anyway, uh, you probably got to this podcast because you Googled, what's the best shit on the internet to watch? And that's okay because you were looking for something else, but you landed here and that's cool. 

Nate McBride 17:36 
Welcome. Either way. Welcome to the shit. We're the best thing on the internet. We're going to rock the art. We're going to RTF you out of your world with some mind blowing it reality tonight. I got to work on that one. 

Nate McBride 17:51 
Um, and besides always being AIAF and home of the sad salad and the nexus of the nether, we are basically the only reliable source of information on the internet. Everything else. 

Joel Nichols 18:04 
Yeah, they might have gotten Nate they might have gotten here cuz cuz Chad GPT hallucinated again, and that's what 

Nate McBride 18:12 
the tagline. The tagline keeps getting longer and longer. You can find all of our episodes on your favorite podcast platform. Just search for the calculus of IT. You can also find them at thecoit .us, which is our website. 

Nate McBride 18:29 
We made some back -end. What's the website? Thecoit .us. Okay. We made some back -end technological changes recently. And I think it all sort of works now. Essentially, I centralized all of our things into a sub -stack board. 

Nate McBride 18:45 
And then visiting thecoit .us just makes your journey to all the greatness a little faster. If you want to continue the conversations on this show, or just tell us that we're shit, or talk to us, or ask us questions about all of our knowledge, let us know. 

Nate McBride 19:02 
You can find the link to our Discord server in the show notes. So please come by and share your innermost thoughts and feelings. You can also find the Discord invite link at our website, again, thecoit .us. 

Nate McBride 19:16 
And also now comment on things at the sub -stack page for the site, which means you have to get a free account. But who are you kidding? You have like a hundred free accounts you don't even know about already. 

Nate McBride 19:25 
Just get one more. And if you don't like to visit Discord, you can go there. I also want to mention that if you like our show, or even if you don't like our show, we don't care. Just give us five stars on any platform. 

Nate McBride 19:38 
In fact, go to all the platforms one at a time and give us five stars wherever you listen to the show, or however many stars is the maximum amount. Just give us all the stars. Oh, because don't like, why would you give somebody not the maximum? 

Nate McBride 19:51 
It doesn't make sense. In our show description, we have links to buy our stuff and buy us a beer. But I want to mention that if you buy us a beer now, we'll drink that beer. And the next time we see you, we will buy you a beer. 

Nate McBride 20:09 
So it's like, you're buying us a beer and paying it forward only to get it back later with interest. Because the price of beer goes up. So my point is that if you bought us a beer, using the buy us a beer link, we promised to buy you a better beer when we meet you. 

Nate McBride 20:27 
Also, if you don't want to buy us a beer, maybe you're having a dry October, maybe you just don't feel like this show needs any more alcohol, whatever. You can actually donate to Wikimedia. And it's like $21. 

Nate McBride 20:40 
Or you can actually donate any amount. Okay, all right, enough of that shit. 

Joel Nichols 20:46 
And when they create their accounts on the website, they should just use their normal email and password that they use in every other account too, right? Cause that's recommended security posture. Yeah. 

Nate McBride 20:57 
you should comment what your password is so that we can keep it prior for you in our own database. 

Kevin Dushney 21:02 
It will help one password to rule them all. 

Speaker 7 21:05 
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 6 22:15 
Thanks for watching! 

Nate McBride 22:39 
Right. 

Mike Crispin 22:41 
Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week. 

Nate McBride 22:42 
use his key. So tonight is a special we are going to get into part one of a two part series on changing the it paradigm. That sounds like a big, big word. In fact, paradigm. It's kind of a big word. I want to take us down some past tonight that may be a bit uncomfortable for our guests. 

Nate McBride 23:09 
And maybe even for our listeners, which should allow us to engage in some deep thought about why things are the way they are, where they might be going in the world of it. More importantly, we will answer whether we should, and how we can influence the direction in which it as it is historically known is going. 

Nate McBride 23:32 
But before we get into that, I want to look at our professional journeys as the context here is important. Personally, this is Nate talking, I stand by the maxim that the best it will come from the bottom, not from the side. 

Nate McBride 23:51 
That is to say the ones who have been on the entire journey from being a help desk level one just doer are the best ones when they get to the top because they have the experience of knowing how every single part of the business works, who works in what ways, they know everything they understand the human being, they're the best EQ. 

Nate McBride 24:15 
But that's my personal opinion. So I want to hear from the three of you on your stories in terms of your professional journey. And I'll then I'll share mine about what I did. And what I'm looking for is like where you began, sort of how you started, and the path that took you from the moment today. 

Nate McBride 24:34 
And I don't want a full reread of your CV, just kind of a high level. So we already know where you are today. But like I want to hear from the beginning, one day you found yourself in it. And then here you are today, kind of give us a highlight of the journey. 

Nate McBride 24:51 
Because I think it's important to do this, to set the stage for not only tonight, but for next week's discussion. So who wants to go first? All right, let's give us the overview. 

Kevin Dushney 25:05 
I mean, so how I found myself initially in IT is, you know, I started in the consulting space, mostly on the infrastructure in Microsoft applications, so like setting up exchange, building networks at the time, it was checkpoint firewalls, stuff like that. 

Kevin Dushney 25:29 
And you know, I think the important thing is, you know, you learn about a lot of different technologies, but also you learn to interface with your clients. So you develop some interpersonal skills, customer service, problem solving, drawing out, you know, what problems are you trying to solve? 

Kevin Dushney 25:48 
So you build a little bit of a base, and ultimately I got hired by, you know, one of my clients was a biotech, and that became my first one. They hired me and became, you know, director of IT there and started my career. 

Kevin Dushney 26:02 
By the, one of the biggest things that like you hit on Nate, I think you could start at the help desk, but my key takeaway and what I always tell people is help me the most of my career is, you know, how much I've learned about the business of biotechnology, from drug discovery to getting into the clinic for the first time, deeper in the clinic to commercial launch, learning what all of your counterparts do, 

Kevin Dushney 26:30 
your business partners do, just enables you to be a better contributor, and I tried like hell to move myself from the IT guy, tech guy to a business partner that brings the technology lens to the table, and that's gotten easier than it used to be now, certainly, than 20 years ago. 

Kevin Dushney 26:50 
It's like whatever, you're fighting a perception that's almost impossible to break, but the more you can demonstrate you know about the business, become conversant there, the more people start to look at you a little differently and say, okay, this person understands our language, understands the business, and maybe I'm more willing to partner with that person, you know, on the technology side, and that's something I've really enjoyed along my journey is now having, 

Kevin Dushney 27:16 
we don't have a lot of shadow IT here, and we have people that are coming to us looking to partner to build capabilities together, and to me that's like the ultimate, and when you can deliver capabilities that are making impact on science, you know, I'll give an example, our proteomics group, it took three weeks to get a turn on a set of data coming off mass specs, revamping their entire pipeline, 

Kevin Dushney 27:44 
moving into the Amazon, streamlining it, they're getting data back in three days now. We got kudos at the company meeting, I was just like, yes, and I couldn't have been happier with the informatics folks, because it's like, you know, my CEO particularly is always about, how are you making impact? 

Kevin Dushney 28:01 
Right there, right, it's not about just turning crank in the back room, it's like, no, we just made a huge impact on science, and now they're getting data back faster, and net result is they're not going into NHP studies blind, and they could do some selectivity work now so fast that they can, they could kick out a molecule and say, this has liabilities and not even putting it in an animal. 

Kevin Dushney 28:27 
So, going from the basic provider of fixing laptops all the way to, you know, delivering real impact to your, to your partners is, to me, the journey that's been really worthwhile and continues to make this like professionally rewarding for me. 

Nate McBride 28:43 
We started out as infrastructure support, and then from there moved up to the ranks to become an IT director. Were you the de facto head of IT as an IT director at that role? 

Kevin Dushney 28:55 
Yeah. Yeah. I've been the head of, so it's an interesting journey for me. I have literally never had an IT mentor. Everything I've learned is on my own, on the job. And it's an interesting journey. I've been the head, the lead of the function at every company I've been in. 

Nate McBride 29:15 
So when you were that director of IT, you really didn't have past precedent. I mean, you had had a boss before, but you really had to kind of like figure out, okay, how do I want to be the boss right then and there? 

Nate McBride 29:28 
And then you, obviously you've, you've attenuated that over the years. You've sort of modified yourself to become more and more, like you've evolved yourself to become the leader you are today. Yeah. 

Nate McBride 29:39 
Yeah. I mean, 

Kevin Dushney 29:41 
I try to come across now is a business leader that, you know, my specialty and my domain of expertise is technology. I can go to any group in the company and I know a lot about what you do and how you work and what you're going to need as we progress through each of our development stages. 

Kevin Dushney 29:59 
And that's a big part of bringing that experience to the table makes you valuable. And you're more inclined to get a quote seat at the table, which is so difficult. But, you know, people are more willing to listen to your input and advice if you bring a business angle versus hey, here's a tech solution to this problem. 

Kevin Dushney 30:19 
And you come at it with, well, yeah, the technology is part of it. Or if you come and say, no, I don't think the technology helps here. Why can't we do this manually? Like now you're bringing a perspective of like, I'm not just going to jam technology down your throat all the time. 

Kevin Dushney 30:33 
I can assess where, you know, I'll give you an example. We're looking at, I don't want to get too specific, but bringing in things that a CRO would normally do at phase two. Why are we doing this? Like, I would normally build none of these things that they're asking for until phase three. 

Kevin Dushney 30:51 
Right. And I'm not saying no, or you're wrong, but convince me and more importantly, the CFO and others why you would take this from the CRO, like a large, a large player and bring it in house. What's the advantage? 

Kevin Dushney 31:06 
Right. What can't you do? Right. Without it. Or if you bring it in, what can you do? Because you're going to spend a lot of money. So rationalizing that being part of that conversation has been really valuable and just sort of building myself up as a leader along the way. 

Kevin Dushney 31:22 
And that's just, that's just like a simple example. But 

Nate McBride 31:25 
No, that's great. And so I want to, I'm just going to, I'm making a note here that you had a thrown into the fire moment when you became that, that IT director, and we're going to circle back to that later. 

Nate McBride 31:36 
Um, Joel, let me pass it over to you. So same, same question. Like, like, how did it happen for you? How did you start even in IT? And how did you get to where you should like bridge those gaps? 

Joel Nichols 31:48 
Yeah, I mean, so, you know, when I finished with my, my master's in Ivy League education, and then went on this this six month rotation for the management tour. Okay, no, that's not actually what happened at all. 

Joel Nichols 32:02 
Not even close. 

Nate McBride 32:07 
Gail didn't immediately give you a master's job, like somewhere as a... 

Joel Nichols 32:11 
I rejected them again. I was tired of them calling to be frank. Actually, they were, if we go back age wise, they were probably paging me. But anyway, no, I, it's kind of funny. So in college, I mean, I'm going to go back while I was in school, because I started my own company to we were getting internet in the rooms is what everyone thought of it as, which meant that they were putting jacks in finally, 

Joel Nichols 32:38 
to give access to the campus. Yeah. So but nobody had computers that even had, you know, land cards. And I had been tinkering and doing summer jobs at computer shops for a while and doing networking. 

Joel Nichols 32:52 
And I was like, cool, I can make my own cat five patch cables. That's a fraction of a cost. So I was visiting Mike over at Micro Center, and buying 1000 feet of cable and crimping and making my own. Right. 

Joel Nichols 33:05 
And then, you don't want to install these ISA cards that I buy in bulk. And then I started bringing other people in. And the only reason I go to all of it, by the way, no, I didn't really get rich. Let's you can only imagine. 

Joel Nichols 33:17 
But it was fun. I also started building computers, because you can say, All right, I can assemble these. And I actually built two for two professors of mine, which is funny, they're computer science professors. 

Joel Nichols 33:27 
And we don't know the hardware. Can you build us a computer? I'm like, sure, yeah, we can do that. It, it taught me about customer service, it taught me about understanding user requirements, to an extent, because these are my professors, I didn't want them to fail me, because I built them the wrong computer. 

Joel Nichols 33:45 
I couldn't just build them what I thought was cool for me, I probably still didn't do a great job of that, because I was, you know, 21, whatever it was. But it helped prepare me then for I landed, my first job was in it. 

Joel Nichols 33:58 
And I was supporting the lab, some lab functions for Eli Lilly. And, you know, we had remedy system for trouble tickets. And so I learned some basics, I can still remember the guy who chewed me out for, I was like, severity, I don't know one, the lab's having a problem with that. 

Joel Nichols 34:16 
I put a severe, very one ticket in because one of the label printers wasn't working. How dare somebody wasn't happy with that. I don't know why. So you learn some things and later took some ITIL foundations. 

Joel Nichols 34:30 
But I was originally a software engineer. But it you know, you just kind of start happening into this. And I'll say, then I was, I was far from the management fast track, I think I was the slowest track ever. 

Joel Nichols 34:43 
Just takes me a while to learn sometimes, I guess. But I was much more interested in what was going on in the business. And that kept bringing me to new functions. But it also helped me get a good depth in terms of understanding why I worked in GMP. 

Joel Nichols 34:59 
And it's like, I was like, why do we have to do this validation? Who honestly ever wants to read this stuff? The answer is still nobody. But I understand better why you have to do it. So, you know, you learn some of those things on the way. 

Joel Nichols 35:14 
And it was really helpful for me to learn the importance of operating principles, and why processes exist, especially as companies grow, because you, you just can't have everybody doing what they want. 

Joel Nichols 35:28 
And when I think about where I am today, I'll kind of fast forward a bit here, Nate. You know, that that really is what I kind of see is what what I do now, it's try to help people, you know, to bridge the gap across all the functions. 

Joel Nichols 35:44 
It's, it's I tell people all the time, like, this is not actually for it. I don't, I don't mean, I don't mean this a bad way. But I don't care. I really don't care if we do this. But it seems like this is what's best combined for HR, finance, legal, you know, regulatory, nobody loves the solution, but it's the one that works for all. 

Kevin Dushney 36:05 
I say that all the time. I'm like, I don't need this. Yeah, I can say that. I'm fine if we do it or not do it, but. 

Joel Nichols 36:12 
Actually, it's easier if we don't. It's one less thing that goes up in the night. 

Kevin Dushney 36:15 
I'm the facilitator of this, right? I'm the orchestrator of all these things, but I'm not going to force you to get an HRIS, so it's for you to determine. I can give you my opinion, and I will, but that takes your responsibility. 

Nate McBride 36:33 
Joel, did you have a thrown into the fire moment? Like Kevin did or someone who you're now the head of IT. 

Joel Nichols 36:43 
Yeah, I mean, probably the closest was, you know, when I my first head of head of IT at a manufacturing facility for Lily, but it was 1000 person facility. So it was kind of all of it was like, Oh, I kind of know what we're doing for help desk. 

Joel Nichols 36:56 
I kind of know what we're doing. I had a pretty senior group. So there I was saved by the people that work for me. Not that anyone would ever go Google me and listen to this podcast. But in case they are, you know, thanks. 

Joel Nichols 37:09 
You guys helped make me look good, despite my own being young and stupid. Yeah, but that that's the closest kind of thrown to the fire moment I had. I mean, I, I've had others as you go into different organizations, you know, where it's like, what, what did I sign up for? 

Joel Nichols 37:24 
But that was the closest where it was just like, how much of this stuff? What am I supporting? I have automation now? What is automation? You know, 

Nate McBride 37:33 
What is automation? Okay. So Michael J. Crispin. 

Mike Crispin 37:38 
Micro Center all the way, day one, 30 years, it's been awesome. 

Joel Nichols 37:44 
Find the main store manager and now you're store manager. That's a huge moment. 

Mike Crispin 37:49 
Ham and I got a new tie today to get the gold watch. Yeah 

Kevin Dushney 37:52 
Like, is that still, is that the 40 year mark? 

Mike Crispin 37:56 
I get a no, no, no, don't go there. I I'm working up to that. 

Joel Nichols 38:01 
It's not a gold watch, it's a calculator watch. You're jumping ahead. Yeah. 

Nate McBride 38:05 
and CAD6 cable. 

Mike Crispin 38:07 
Well, it's actually a new drive. It's a blinks. It's fantastic. But I started in it in the late nineties. I was like a SIS admin. I was on a contract for a small, um, what was it? Civil engineering firm. 

Mike Crispin 38:25 
That was still a senior in high school. And, um, I got plugged into her family friend and set up a novel network. And that all stumped me geeking out at home with this stuff. So that was what I did my spare time. 

Mike Crispin 38:40 
Just kind of interesting. That's how I got to micro center so quickly. But out of that, I started working off of Boston financial. And then that was really my opportunity to work, uh, a regulated company in the banking industry, and that was pretty much tail end to college. 

Mike Crispin 38:57 
And I skipped, uh, skipped into being a computer lab manager at Bridgewater state. And then found out that I could put a resume in at Symantec and like double my pay and skip out of school and start working for them. 

Mike Crispin 39:12 
So I went as a SIS admin. That was the first global company I worked for all SIS at Unix administration for the most part, and, um, and some windows as well, Solaris. And then I got let go from that company as they made some cuts. 

Mike Crispin 39:27 
And I met a head hunter who said, you should go work in biotech. That's where it's at. You're going to, once you go there, you'll never leave. And this is 2001. And, um, total geek all into the technology, loved it all. 

Mike Crispin 39:41 
Loved everything that I was doing. Got to TKT and met Mr. McBride and a few others. And they showed me the ropes of life sciences, whether it would be, um, GMP and computer system validation to infrastructure, to disaster recovery, to database management, all that stuff outside of the scope of kind of the traditional IT things I was working on as, as a young man, so to speak. 

Kevin Dushney 40:06 
Pause or FileMaker Pro is not database administration just I just want 

Joel Nichols 40:10 
I didn't touch that. Oh, hey there. What's that man? Oh, what do you think is driving my what do you think is driving my big data strategy? Come on, Kevin. Oh, you are right. 

Kevin Dushney 40:23 
resist that one, I'll pay for it, but I think I'm- 

Mike Crispin 40:25 
I learned all about Hotline servers and Hotwire servers and Torrance and Livewire and all that stuff. 

Kevin Dushney 40:35 
Working for naps and all the people that were storing mp3s on your network and 

Nate McBride 40:40 
Only one guy, the head of IT. 

Mike Crispin 40:45 
Oh, great influence, great influence. And then I went over to Cubist and that's I got thrown into enterprise architecture. And that's when I started working a little more closely with the business and didn't really know much about it. 

Mike Crispin 40:59 
Thought at first it was like an enterprise apps type person and then found out it was much more than that. It was business architecture and integration architecture and budgeting and principles and governance and all that stuff. 

Mike Crispin 41:12 
And I was like, this computer geek is learning about governance. Like, oh my goodness, this is, I wasn't in for it at first. But I, it helped me because when I left there, I had a great opportunity to go be the be ahead of it at a small company called Carrick's who was had a really tall order in front of them. 

Mike Crispin 41:34 
They had no it at all. And they had a PDUFA date and no commercial field for force, no operations, nothing ready to go and wanted to go commercial and have it ready have quality other functions really ready to go in seven months. 

Mike Crispin 41:51 
So they said, come in and let's go. We really got to move quickly hire a small team and really test the ropes. So throwing the deep end of the pool and learned a lot through that experience and got merged with Akibia about four years later and built out a really a full enterprise global IT team and had a real really good time. 

Mike Crispin 42:16 
And, and Joel, like you like had a great team that really helped me and, and helped me to be at the table to focus on a lot of the business strategy and the long term planning and really be a part of the leadership team and keep that organization running from an operations perspective, but also enable a lot of the change in the company. 

Mike Crispin 42:35 
And then just recently went over to Cardurian and kind of started a little more much more established than Carrick's, but at a company where it really could start in a more modern approach to things. 

Mike Crispin 42:47 
So I think it's been a great experience. So yeah, started really as a total and still a total tech nerd. You guys probably know that already, but that's a hobby. That's a hobby. I have to do the day job. 

Kevin Dushney 42:59 
I had a seeking suspicion, Mike, but yeah. 

Mike Crispin 43:03 
But, um... 

Joel Nichols 43:04 
Well, I'm glad there's somebody on this call that's a tech nerd. We needed one. 

Mike Crispin 43:10 
I'm sure you guys are all there too with me, but it's been a lot of fun. It's been a lot of fun. I really like what I do and it's been trying to learn something new every day. 

Nate McBride 43:19 
Would you say that the going to Cubist was the thrown in the fire moment or going to Carrix was the thrown in the fire moment? 

Mike Crispin 43:26 
They were both fire moments because there was this big push, not so much at Cubist, because I think there was people I knew, their Nada, I knew Tony, I knew people there before that had worked there before and it was in well, but it was really the enterprise architecture moment where I don't think anyone knew what the definition of that was gonna be and what that role was all about. 

Mike Crispin 43:49 
And I helped to drive some of that. And I think that was one of those moments where it was like, there's a lot I have to learn here that's outside of anything I've done before and we're just going to Europe. 

Mike Crispin 44:00 
So there was a lot there that we had to get right quickly. And Carex was there too. I mean, that was the first time I've ever run an IT organization. There was a lot of unknowns and a lot of opportunity and just worked my ass off on that probably to my own detriment to some extent. 

Mike Crispin 44:19 
But I had a good time learning as much as I could there, but they were both deep into the pool moments. 

Nate McBride 44:29 
right. That's all awesome. I mean, so I'll give you my quick journey, which was that even going back to high school, I worked in the computer lab at my school, I managed all the max and this is going back to sort of like my teens before that I had done programming, but I always thought I always looked at computers like it was a video game like I didn't have I had a Nintendo I had these things but like every time I could touch a computer, 

Nate McBride 44:52 
it was like playing a video game. It didn't matter what I was doing. It was just always like video game related somehow because it was a screen and there was stuff. So when I left, when I went to college, I worked in the labs, computer labs, as a work study job, all four years. 

Nate McBride 45:08 
And that evolved into just being a guy who worked in like help desk hours on the in the computer labs to running a computer lab to running all the computer labs, putting the decaltrix system for our first telnet to helping to wire the dorms. 

Nate McBride 45:24 
And I just kept getting like pulled into these situations, not because I was better than anybody else, but because I was like a body standing there, looking dumb and needing money. And so, like with Joel, I help professors write papers, say papers to disk, print them out, get all their students papers printed, like stupid things like this. 

Nate McBride 45:46 
But when I went, when I left college, I went to become a teacher, I taught Latin. And that was my goal, like to become a teacher. This computer stuff wasn't going to make any money. I wanted to become a teacher, a noble profession. 

Nate McBride 45:58 
I taught Latin and Greek. And at my first school I taught at, they also asked me to be an IT person for the school. And so I worked along with I decided another gentleman. And I learned HTML, I learned how to make web pages, I learned all this like random information. 

Nate McBride 46:19 
But that again, was so sort of out of band. It didn't really matter. I was there to teach and that's what I did. But I ended up also teaching hyper studio. And I learned C and I learned JavaScript. And these are things I just learned by reading and trying out myself. 

Nate McBride 46:33 
So, but it all fit part of that teaching paradigm. Anyway, this is important for later in the story. So I grew tired of the the working in New York and making no money. I went to a boarding school in Western Mass, where I was the head of IT for the whole school. 

Nate McBride 46:48 
And this was my throne to the fire moment because I was the only person responsible for 12 buildings, 500 students on a boarding school campus. I had no knowledge of networking, no knowledge of server management. 

Nate McBride 47:01 
We ran a first class email system. That was called first class. I had to run everything sort of in one. We had we had point to point Wi Fi on buildings that was on the on the roof of the buildings. I had to run a microwave, all this stuff I had to learn. 

Nate McBride 47:17 
And there was no Google. So it was like any person I could call to come and help me out from the vendors I call and I would milk those people for everything they were worth. Like the guy would come out to help me with the microwave dishes. 

Nate McBride 47:29 
I sit there and grill this guy for three hours. Like why does this happen? And where does this go? And what's this cable mean? And so I learned all this stuff just by rote. But the whole point was I was still gonna be a teacher like this is all great. 

Nate McBride 47:43 
I'll do the it thing, but I'm really here to teach. And it wasn't until I went to TKT in 1998. That I guess was my second throne of the fire moment because I met my my IT manager at a lunch at Mac world in Boston, just sort of bumped into him. 

Nate McBride 48:02 
And he offered me a job. It was like double my salary. It was still nothing to come be. He didn't have really a role. It was just come join the team. And then we'll just do all the things that need to be done. 

Nate McBride 48:17 
I learned how to be a Unix's admin. I learned I plan it. I learned I learned Linux. I learned how to operate sun servers. I learned I got my MCSE. I learned all this like random shit. But I made so much money as a 23 year old. 

Nate McBride 48:34 
I thought I was so rich. Like I didn't know what to do with it like 50 grand. Holy shit. Let me do all this money. I'm loving. Yeah, that's what we did. That's what anyway. So my so what happened next to me was after four years at TKT. 

Nate McBride 48:57 
My boss left. And I didn't know this was going to happen but made me the head of IT on his exit. Not people that were more tenured or smarter than me but made me the head of IT. Which is still a decision I wonder about today. 

Nate McBride 49:14 
But so all of a sudden I became the head of all these people that I had essentially worshiped because they're so smart. And did what I could, I did my best to sort of manage these folks. But from there, I went to Cubist and a whole bunch of other companies, in fact, seven in total. 

Nate McBride 49:32 
And all along the way, kept learning from everyone I could around me, like, I was at MIT, for seven companies, I was the head of it. I never went back to being not the head of it, which was interesting, because I didn't have the chops to do this, like the next four companies. 

Nate McBride 49:47 
But I kept learning, and screwing up and figuring out, and basically being so good at bullshitting that no one sort of caught on to this. And then in the last three companies or two companies, as you say, I really got in a grasp of what it means to be an IT leader. 

Nate McBride 50:04 
But my ocean moments came at sort of critical times. And I managed to kind of get through those to ram today. Which is that I look at now, nascent IT talent, like the up and coming people that I'm very desperately invested in, because I think they're key to what's going to happen. 

Nate McBride 50:28 
And I have a question about them, which I'll ask all of you, and I don't want you to answer it yet. But I do want you to think about it, because we're going to come back to it. But I want y 'all think about this, which is, would it be possible, like the journeys that the four of us had, would it ever be possible for that to happen again. 

Nate McBride 50:52 
And so I just want you to think about that, because we're gonna come back to it. But effectively, is it will every possible again, for someone to have the same IT journey that we had, coming at the bottom, having these thrown in the fire moments, and working their way through the whole process, learning what it means to be a good, if not great IT leader. 

Nate McBride 51:16 
I don't think so. Well, hold off on the answer. Because we want to dive into that. But it's good to set the context for all this. Because when we get into this first topic tonight, and I realized that we're, we've been talking 52 minutes, but we're now getting into this, I want to set a lot of context around we're about to talk about tonight and next week, because we're actually talking about the IT department. 

Nate McBride 51:40 
And is it working? Is it the way it should be? Or have we just held on traditional dogma? And like, we're just continuing to move forward in this pattern, because it's what we know, even though at least this group of people knows, there's potentially other ways. 

Nate McBride 51:59 
So I want to discuss that. I broke it down into basically for tonight, for kind of main areas of approach. I want to talk about the current state of IT departments. And we can talk about our own. We're talking about them in the abstract. 

Nate McBride 52:15 
I want to talk about the current state of the IT department, like what roles do you have, etc. I want to talk about emerging trends. I mean, yes, we have the generative AI zeitgeist effect going on. But what are the emerging trends that are going to affect us and the future? 

Nate McBride 52:32 
The changing role of IT in the organization? Okay, so like, yes, aside from the structure you've created, how is it impacting and being impacted by the best organization? And then lastly, the skills and competencies needed for the next couple of years. 

Nate McBride 52:52 
So we'll jump in first with the current state of the department. So I'll ask each of you, I'll ask any of you, you can just shout out, but you think about where you started, and your steps along the way, and where you are today, just without even talking about forward, what would you say maybe like two or three key things are that have changed in your leadership development over the last two decades? 

Nate McBride 53:22 
How does it evolve? 

Kevin Dushney 53:26 
Um, I'll say one thing that jumps out to me is just the integration with the business now versus even 10 years ago is drastically different, which is kind of connects back to my earlier comment about why I think it would be so much harder today because whatever 20 years ago, pick a marker, people didn't really. 

Kevin Dushney 53:51 
They saw it as like a cost center. Like, oh yeah, we need it. You need internet and email servers at Blackberry and whatever to do stuff. But you weren't perceived as a business partner. You're like, you were just a service provider and now that's very different. 

Kevin Dushney 54:07 
If you do it right, right, you build the right group, you have really right leader. Um, you know, and drive the fact that, Hey, technology is now a lifeblood of a company and you can't be successful without it. 

Kevin Dushney 54:20 
Um, so I think it gives you a lot more credibility and, um, you know, it would be harder to step through that naively in today's age, right? They likely just hire over you someone with expertise because now it's so critical to a successful company. 

Kevin Dushney 54:39 
If that makes sense. 

Nate McBride 54:42 
It does. I would ask you like if you, so I agree, by the way, the integration, I mean, it used to be a cost center. Now it's directly integrated into the business. The business wants IT to provide their feedback, their opinion, their understanding of this thing. 

Nate McBride 55:00 
What do you think, like, if you could pinpoint one particular catalyst as to why you think that changed, if not, it could have just been a gradual change, but I'm curious as to whether or not you think it was like a moment that this changed. 

Mike Crispin 55:14 
I think some of it's consumerism and cybersecurity. I think there's, people use technology outside of work a lot more now. And I think over, and that's, you know, that's been true for a number of years, but I mean, now it's a realization that it's, as Kevin said, it's a part of the business. 

Mike Crispin 55:31 
It's the utility that we need to continue to make better. It's competitive advantage. Flipside, it's also an organization that helps mitigate and make risk visible. And I think there's a big kind of GRC and cybersecurity component of IT, or even that's maybe not even IT. 

Mike Crispin 55:52 
That executive teams are very aware of, just like AI and big data and better sales and commercial platforms or indoor access to customer bases. I mean, it's things like that. They're all technology driven today. 

Mike Crispin 56:08 
And I think people are more comfortable with technology too, just new technology, maybe not as much as we'd all like at times, but for the most part, they are willing to, if there's a reason, if there's a driver, if there's a use case to make things better, faster, it's cheaper, they're on board to have that discussion, which I think years ago, that may not have been the case. 

Mike Crispin 56:32 
Like you said, it costs them. I think the other one, 

Kevin Dushney 56:35 
one is access, right? Yeah, technology. So again, rewind, you know, you're building a data center, well, this stuff, you're a small to mid size biotech, you can't compete or afford the stuff that GSK can but to our Viva t shirt wearing friend now I as a person company can go get get the same capabilities as yep, a huge player. 

Kevin Dushney 57:03 
And I think if you 

Joel Nichols 57:05 
can afford them. 

Kevin Dushney 57:06 
Well, right. That's the different conversation, but that that access and availability of very powerful. Well, using even Amazon example access to compute And I don't think people I know people generally don't understand this because there's so many ways to do, you know, to do something or products that are duplicative and like how do I choose the right one and They're looking for it to help guide you and shepherd through the process and you mentioned requirements earlier, 

Kevin Dushney 57:36 
Joel. It's like more important than ever to get the right solution because he could say, I can. There's four products that do generally what you're asking, but Those requirements like right now, but also forcing them to think ahead three to five years. 

Kevin Dushney 57:50 
So like shit. This thing ran out of steam two years in this is a bad decision rip it out and replace it like this is thing. Is it right fit for purpose now, but also does it have longevity as this Company becomes more complex, whether it's deeper in the clinic XUS, you know, whatever the case may be 

Joel Nichols 58:09 
And you stole a lot of what I was going to say, Kevin. I mean, it's exactly it. I think you said access. I'll take a slight variation, but it's more or less the same thing. Technology, the ease of use of technology, much easier than it used to be. 

Joel Nichols 58:24 
That used to be what traditional IT offered, is hey, we will teach you how to use SAP ECC, right? Oh, you just put in the Z code, right? Like everyone's mind's blown as they're trying to figure that out. 

Joel Nichols 58:36 
But it's a lot easier to use the tech. So the bar's been raised. What's hard to do is exactly what you were saying, which is implement the right technology for the right problem. That is what's, that is a real science slash art. 

Joel Nichols 58:54 
And that takes a combination of experience. And it's not just technology experience. It is project management experience. It is business experience. It is conversation and people relationships and all the things which kind of probably don't go for the traditional techie type of role, but you just have to be able to put all that together in a useful way. 

Nate McBride 59:16 
Absolutely. So with that being said, again, we're talking about. So all three of you have been doing this for at least 20 plus years. And when you started off, you were doing various sort of support roles and you worked in IT organizations where most of what happened in IT was sort of behind the wall, right? 

Nate McBride 59:38 
Like you need something from IT, you have to ask IT. Can't, you can't go like get your own SaaS app. You can't go, you know, get some freaking download credit card where login or something, it was, you got to ask IT legitimately. 

Nate McBride 59:54 
Obviously now it's so that someone can go do something without ever asking IT. And so the role is, and Kevin, you like, you just sort of integrated into the business, I think about that. It's like a double -edged sort of, double -edged sort of sword, like, so your role is not only providing what you think is best, but also picking up on the vibe, like listening to where the business is going and giving them what they, 

Nate McBride 01:00:27 
they think they need or what you think they need, but listening to their requirements. There's like, we didn't have that 20 years ago. You didn't listen to the businesses like, Oh, we could use some like SaaS. 

Nate McBride 01:00:37 
They didn't have that language. They didn't have SaaS or cloud. They used what you gave them. Or if they asked for a platform, it was what came after one year of implementation. Right. 

Kevin Dushney 01:00:51 
Yeah, right, the lag was huge. Yeah, that's a good point. 

Nate McBride 01:00:58 
Sorry. Who's going to speak? Mike, is that you? 

Mike Crispin 01:01:02 
No, I didn't say anything. 

Nate McBride 01:01:03 
Okay, sorry. So, so, let's parlay this point. And I'll start with Mike with you this time. So, with that idea that nowadays, people can just do things. And let's let's keep the governance part of this out like oh yeah I don't know we have a help desk you can put any sass out without asking us all throw that shit aside for a second. 

Nate McBride 01:01:25 
So let's let's focus on the bigger picture. In what ways are like, so it's you and Kate at Carderion. Do you feel any pressure to, I wouldn't say be on the cutting edge but usually pressure to be not behind. 

Nate McBride 01:01:45 
And if you do like how are you responding to that. Do you feel any pressure to essentially bring innovation to the table. 

Mike Crispin 01:01:52 
I think there's pressure to bring innovation to the table. I think it's more on us to show that if there is an opportunity for it, where there are a lot of software as a service systems or approaches to getting things done that would work just fine at a small company. 

Mike Crispin 01:02:07 
So I don't think there's a lot of pressure to do the sort of the cutting edge type of thing, unless, you know, what was cutting edge a few years ago is pretty normal now. So there's not a lot of room to jump on, skip the line just for innovation's sake, I think at this point. 

Mike Crispin 01:02:23 
So there's not a lot of pressure there, but we, you know, we certainly want to do things better, faster and quicker and ways that people can adopt and use the tools with as little overhead and training as possible. 

Mike Crispin 01:02:37 
So, but no pressure, I think, to innovate. We want to innovate, obviously. That's an exciting thing to do, but there's not a, there's pretty standard ways that we can get the job done right now and at the right cost and at the right speed the business wants to move at. 

Mike Crispin 01:02:52 
So I don't think there's a lot of, at least in the current role of them, and no, it's not a huge, no one's saying you better innovate. 

Nate McBride 01:02:59 
So, so, Joel, are you feeling pressure to drive innovation? 

Joel Nichols 01:03:04 
I mean, I would say it's a little bit different. It's, um, you know, there's, there's a key buzzword out there. It's, I mean, this is going to probably blow up your podcast because I doubt you've ever talked about AI, but apparently that's right. 

Kevin Dushney 01:03:21 
45 -minute lead -in on AI. 

Joel Nichols 01:03:24 
And by the way, that stands for artificial intelligence. I know it's a new acronym. I should make sure I spell it out. Oh, that's good to me. Oh, man. No, but I make a lot of jokes that there's a lot of artificial intelligence about AI out there right now. 

Joel Nichols 01:03:37 
It's very artificial how it's being used. And every vendor is throwing it at every one of my business partners in ways. And they're being told by board members and people out there that if you're not playing with it, you're behind. 

Joel Nichols 01:03:49 
And again, I'm sure this has already been covered. But it is probably one of the big innovation topics. And so my job is, one, not to poo -poo it, because I think it has a real place. But my job is to understand as best as possible, where is it being used effectively? 

Joel Nichols 01:04:08 
What are some of the ways it's being used? What are some of the use cases we have that we might consider how we might use it? Help show people that, hey, if you want to try a use case, you should really do a return on investment. 

Joel Nichols 01:04:21 
And then this is a real novelty. After you're done with your case, go back and see how well you actually did in that proposed ROI. No one ever does that because they're scared. And I get it. But to me, that's, yeah, exactly. 

Joel Nichols 01:04:36 
But to me, that's what I want to do with innovation is we should do it. But we need to really think because otherwise you get a sour taste where you shouldn't and where you throw money everywhere just for the sake of innovating instead of understanding where something is potentially really appealing. 

Nate McBride 01:04:56 
So let me ask you this question, Joel, when was the last time you felt the same pressure from a platform technology idea that you have with AI? 

Joel Nichols 01:05:10 
Ask it again, so when was the last time I felt pressure from a platform? 

Nate McBride 01:05:16 
Obviously, we all probably get the same thing with AI. Are we doing it? When are we going to use it? How are we going to make it? When was the last time and what technology was involved when you felt the same pressure in your car? 

Joel Nichols 01:05:28 
same, similar. Yeah, it's a good question. I think because I was doing automation for a while, IoT became a big thing. Hey, let's do something with IoT. Why shouldn't we be doing something with IoT? And kind of how that was being made to work, even to some extent, micro services. 

Joel Nichols 01:05:45 
Hey, here we have micro services, we don't have to do interfaces anymore, right? You just plug and play everything like, well, that sounds great. And the reality is, micro services are transformative. 

Joel Nichols 01:05:56 
It's so much better than it used to be. It's not quite that simple. And it takes a while for things to evolve. And you still have to have an understanding and expertise to be able to effectively use it. 

Joel Nichols 01:06:10 
IoT, similar, I think it's got a really good place. I think it's got some things it can do. It's it's also not just, you know, plug and play to replace automation, there's still plenty of DCS controllers out there. 

Joel Nichols 01:06:22 
So I felt the pressure at different points in my career. And to me, AI is just this new. Here we go again. 

Nate McBride 01:06:30 
Alright, so Kevin, I'm gonna give you a chance to answer the question in a moment. Before we do that, I want to ask an intermittent question and we're gonna start with Joel and go or anybody can answer this. 

Nate McBride 01:06:38 
But Joel, actually, you can start this. So you already felt this pressure once in your life in your career, maybe actually more than once you add IoT and microservices now AI. So you know, these moments come right these big giant impactful like, oh my god, computer world says we got to do this, or micro center says we should do this, or like whatever, we should be doing this thing, bored ass CEO ass, 

Nate McBride 01:07:02 
and then you just kind of wait for it, it goes away. If we have had these events in the past, and we're having it again now, what's changed and how we respond to these events? Like if you, if you already know how to respond to one because you've had one in the past, having one now, is there a difference in response? 

Joel Nichols 01:07:25 
Yeah. This kind of ties into what we were talking about earlier, because it's the access. So with some of those others, they would ask questions of, hey, I hear this is cool. Can you guys do this? They have been reading a lot about this. 

Joel Nichols 01:07:39 
Can you do this? Now I'm getting, you know, hey, just saw this from our current vendor, and they can turn this on tomorrow. It's fine if we do that, right? And I'm like, well, I'm glad you at least asked. 

Joel Nichols 01:07:55 
You know, there's there's so much more access to these, to turning on AI, that if you don't have good business partners, unfortunately, I do, you know, you could just find things turned on all over the place and kind of new technology, which may be half baked roaming through your ecosystem. 

Nate McBride 01:08:17 
But I don't want to misquote you, but ultimately what I want to understand is if 10 years ago you were forced to do IOT edge compute, or you were not forced to do it, but everyone was like, let's do this. 

Nate McBride 01:08:28 
We guys, we should be doing this. You had a certain response at that time. Did you use the same response with generative AI or is it a different type of response now? Have you learned something about responding in that period of time? 

Joel Nichols 01:08:41 
Well, hopefully I've learned, but maybe I'll, yeah, the way I'll phrase it is, is succinctly. I had more control on how it was getting, how and when it was going to be implemented. Now I can do my best to educate and try to influence, but there is less direct control. 

Joel Nichols 01:09:01 
Got it. 

Nate McBride 01:09:03 
Mike or Kevin. 

Kevin Dushney 01:09:06 
Um, I mean, I think one fascinating thing I find with AI is it's there's like FOMO at the board level. And it's the first time I've ever seen this. Like if you're not doing it, you're behind. Why? How? 

Kevin Dushney 01:09:20 
You know, what? Because when you really dig into, and a lot of companies have, like, OK, let's tear out what our opportunities are, right? Early discovery research. This is really shaky ground. There's tons of VC money here, and we can do this. 

Kevin Dushney 01:09:40 
But you have it. And big companies have thrown a ton of money at this. And Mark can throw $10 million in an AI project, and it doesn't work. And you're like, well, oh, well, play on. But does a small biotech want to put that kind of capital on a flyer to maybe get nothing? 

Kevin Dushney 01:09:58 
But you move into the clinical space and say, well, all right. Now I can partner with someone that has access to EMR data. Let's say I'm designing a large clinical trial, and I want to optimize inclusion and exclusion criteria. 

Kevin Dushney 01:10:16 
And now we're getting somewhere. Or productivity. I think those are probably the easiest ones, like co -pilot, or if you've ever looked at Glean, which is pretty cool, by the way. You know, these are, hey, if I can shave a half an hour, a week, or 15 minutes a day off of someone's workload by using these tools, great. 

Kevin Dushney 01:10:38 
But it's all about, you know, we've always had tools. And it's like, AI is a tool. What problem are we solving? And I love to always ask that question is, what business problem are we solving with this? 

Kevin Dushney 01:10:50 
And the answer is, it's cool. Everyone else is doing it. And that's not a business case. So why are we all of a sudden relaxing our rules for bringing in all other technology, except for AI, that can vault in the door and get tons of money thrown out because it's overhyped? 

Kevin Dushney 01:11:09 
So I think that's where I'm at right now. And that's what I'm trying to educate my company on. It's like, look, I have no problem. But it's also now being forced down our throats, like diligent. These are board books, right? 

Kevin Dushney 01:11:21 
They just, oh, hey, we've got an AI offering now. I'm like, I don't want that. Like, these are the most sensitive materials in the company. And then now it's summarizing it for the board members. Like, I think they can read it. 

Kevin Dushney 01:11:31 
They're paid for that. So our GC is like, all right, we need to dig into this right away. Where is this going? Are we training your model? If you're a board member on multiple boards using diligent, it's like, you know, maybe the answer is probably no, but you just, you got to close out these questions of, am I training your model? 

Kevin Dushney 01:11:50 
And then we started building those questions into our, you know, MSAs when we signed on a new vendor, right? We expanded the cyber questionnaire to include specific AI language. So it's being jammed on your throat too. 

Kevin Dushney 01:12:02 
Adobe is doing it. Oh, you sure you don't want to turn this on? Are you sure you want to turn it off? And enough already. Like, but that's what it comes back to is the, you know, what's the business use case is the grounding thing. 

Kevin Dushney 01:12:14 
And if you don't have a clear ROI and you don't want to burn a bunch of capital, I think that's the way, that's one way to put people at ease. And also let's talk about the training, right? Let's say I deliver this thing. 

Kevin Dushney 01:12:28 
Now I need to train you. Are you willing at a time where we're trying to file all these, you know, submissions? Are you, do you want to stop in regulatory and learn how to use an AI tool to do enhance your medical writing? 

Kevin Dushney 01:12:40 
I don't know. Maybe you do, but I'm guessing probably at a critical time, the interest probably no. 

Mike Crispin 01:12:47 
And do another round of reviews. Yeah, it's out right 

Kevin Dushney 01:12:53 
But if you use it to paste text in and hey, can you clean this up for me? And I got to use that all the time. Make this sound this way, make it sound friendlier. Like it's really cool, but is that transformational? 

Kevin Dushney 01:13:04 
No, it's very incremental. And augment is that's a word to your day to day. 

Nate McBride 01:13:13 
So Kevin, would you have, would you have 10 years ago approach from the same angle if some new technology had come out and the board had been gone about it? Would you have come up with the same way about it? 

Nate McBride 01:13:26 
Or are you looking at AI from a different lens now that you've got again, 10 years into your role? 

Kevin Dushney 01:13:34 
That's a good question. I mean, I think it's a strong reaction because I know it's so overhyped and there's so many people just trying to throw this, push this into all their software and be like, oh, this is AI for everything now and it's a better product versus I can't really remember a time where there was a similar sort of technology evolution that felt like this. 

Kevin Dushney 01:14:07 
So I don't know. It's a good question. I don't know how I'd answer that. 

Mike Crispin 01:14:12 
Okay, I think with AI, that's different from some of the things in the past, this is almost magical. You know, I mean, this is this is the thing, you put something in and something awesome comes out. 

Kevin Dushney 01:14:23 
They have a wand and it's all over again. 

Mike Crispin 01:14:26 
Yeah, it sounds like magic to a lot of people, I think. And it's, I mean, being able to talk about it and weigh the risks and the benefits is important. And any time it comes up, that's largely what the discussion is. 

Nate McBride 01:14:40 
Yeah, right. So I made some notes on this because we're going to have to come back to some of these thoughts. It's interesting some of the things you've said, you all said about this, because well, I don't want to spoil the surprise. 

Nate McBride 01:14:53 
So Mike, I'm going to start with you this time. I know you're only a year into Carderian, but when you came in there, there was some technical debt. There was some legacy issues. And I see Kevin and Joel, you've got a little bit more tenure places at your places. 

Nate McBride 01:15:13 
So you can talk about this too, but Mike first. So thinking about Carderian and even your previous company. So like what strategies have you developed over your tenure, over your career, that when you walk into a company and you see technical debt and legacy systems, you're able to address that. 

Mike Crispin 01:15:35 
You know, educate the organization on what they have already, because I think a lot of times they may not have a good grasp of where things are and what they already have. That's a very gentle process just to go through and give an inventory of systems and things that are already in place. 

Mike Crispin 01:15:50 
And give a general strategy as to if there's an opportunity to consolidate and everything I've done is pretty much rely to run cybersecurity for the most part is being the driving force and not not overly talking about scary risk and that type of stuff. 

Mike Crispin 01:16:04 
But adding some of that to the conversation just because of what you see in the past with data sprawl or data leakage or those type of things and that we are so small that we can address them quickly. 

Mike Crispin 01:16:15 
So building a plan when you're a small company of 20 or 30 people at that stage where you don't have to take too much of everyone's time to start to put some sort of model in place is the first approach. 

Mike Crispin 01:16:27 
Through interviews, through having those discussions and trying to insert yourself in an organization. A lot of times that's why you're hired. They're kind of expecting you to come in and start that process. 

Mike Crispin 01:16:40 
So the strategy is to get a picture of everything and build a short, let's say a pseudo mini roadmap to those core areas of the business. And just like AI is a buzzword and not just a buzzword, but a very important thing. 

Mike Crispin 01:16:56 
Cybersecurity is bigger than ever. And it's it's all it's everything to everyone, and it should be and it's very important. And sometimes you can use AI and cybersecurity kind of balance things out. You know, we talk about the AI and the data that's within different systems and employee risk and cybersecurity awareness and all those things. 

Mike Crispin 01:17:19 
Having that part of the initial strategy helps you helps you go in there with a kind of a balanced approach of risk versus benefit and and having those discussions and you're enabling the company. I mean, we talked about innovation before, innovation to do the coolest new thing. 

Mike Crispin 01:17:38 
It's also innovation to kind of even be more minimalist and take things where you can move faster with fewer people for a company that wants to move quickly. So it's it's definitely innovation. 

Kevin Dushney 01:17:50 
necessarily have to be, you know, super sexy. Again, I came back to the impact like that proteomics example. Yeah, that was that was just a matter of our informatics team building a really nice pipeline in Amazon, leveraging the compute. 

Kevin Dushney 01:18:05 
Is that innovative? I don't know. It's more efficient and made a huge impact. But I don't know that I call that innovation. I just call it like more process optimization or, hey, let's unpack why it takes so long to get data turned around. 

Kevin Dushney 01:18:21 
And I can solve this problem. There's no AI involved, by the way. 

Nate McBride 01:18:26 
Would you have used the words, process optimization 10 years ago? What would you say, Nate? Would you have used the words, process optimization 10 years ago? No. I just want to be clear. Like we're talking about, we're talking about what, like what you've learned in just even the last 10 years. 

Nate McBride 01:18:45 
I use the same phrase, process optimization. Like what have we learned? We've learned that these are things that are sometimes more important technology itself. What's the process? What is the process? 

Nate McBride 01:18:58 
And, and, and where does it come in? Like, where does it come off saying your process sucks. Uh, you can't have this platform. We're you're not, we're not, it's not quality. How do we know the quality process sucks? 

Nate McBride 01:19:11 
Well, we can say, I've seen your quality departments know your process sucks. So yeah, there's a, there's a line there, right? It's interesting, but I, I want to go to Joel on this one too, Joel. So you've got manufacturing experience up the butt. 

Nate McBride 01:19:27 
Um, what strategies have you found effective in addressing that? 

Joel Nichols 01:19:36 
It's, well, it's funny. I'm not sure these are even strategies as much as I'm old and worn down. Eight. Well, that's a strategy. No, I think the younger version of myself had this Pollyanna pie in the sky of great, we need to retire all these, you know, let's put a retirement and we'll have all this and we'll do but achievable. 

Joel Nichols 01:20:07 
The organizational change management in retiring systems and moving off of some forms of tech debt, you know, again, the younger version of me not thinking, you know, like Kevin's talked about, like a business partner, we even say like, Hey, yeah, it's work. 

Joel Nichols 01:20:25 
You guys just need to go ahead and, you know, move all of your data. We're going to move to a new SharePoint and everybody take your time and do all of this reorganize it. It's fine. It's going to be great. 

Joel Nichols 01:20:35 
These are people. Yeah. These are people who are working to get our products into the clinic. These are scientists who are fighting and it's not reasonable for me to think that it's important. It's important, but I don't, I'd be mischaracterizing. 

Joel Nichols 01:20:50 
So certain elements of tech debt. I have, I'm working on how to work around them and accept them to an extent and which ones are really a priority because they have a greater risk. They have, I won't be able to scale knowing where the company's going. 

Joel Nichols 01:21:09 
And so I, I've kind of taken more of an 80 20 approach. There's 20%. I really don't think I'm going to, so instead I have to shore up, I have to secure them. Yeah, you know, that's, yeah, I have a concept that right now we're working on a content consolidation project, you know, which is this, Hey, we've got stuff all over the place. 

Joel Nichols 01:21:32 
Can we put it all together in one new, you know, SharePoint? Yeah. In theory. But again, think about how much work's involved. The idea that we're going to retire a lot of these legacy places is, is not realistic, but if we can shrink the number of licenses and utilize an AI platform, this is effective use of AI to help do a true search. 

Joel Nichols 01:21:56 
There are some good tools out there, which, you know, because of large language models within your own kind of ecosystem, they can pull out meaningful information. And so it's a different approach than I would have taken in the past, which is a little bit of an acquiesce to tech debt. 

Joel Nichols 01:22:12 
Some of it I kind of almost have to accept. 

Nate McBride 01:22:18 
Well, you can always call my company xferia .com, by the way, help you with structure data management. I wasn't able to plug that in the show. So Kevin, we'll get to you in just one quick second, but I want to follow up with Joel here. 

Nate McBride 01:22:37 
So again, same question I asked Mike. Your 10 years ago self wouldn't have really had to do with all this labor and work, because it would have taken a very long time to make any kind of change. And so everyone would have to get by and you would have to check all the boxes and get all the approvals and do all the work. 

Nate McBride 01:22:57 
But like today, yesterday, for instance, if someone came to you and said, we're tired of using Asana, we want to put notion in tomorrow. Would it take you a year to go through a project change? Or would it be like, okay, cool, let's do that on Monday? 

Nate McBride 01:23:19 
I'm not trying to be good. But would it be the same approach? 

Joel Nichols 01:23:24 
I think the problem is, is then I started going, did you know we've got, I mean, is that you for your department? Because I have 20 other departments that are using Asana. And so now I'm going to give you notion. 

Joel Nichols 01:23:35 
And then when I go to the budget review, they want to know why I have all these applications. So it's, these are the only parts of it that maybe make it a little challenging. 

Nate McBride 01:23:45 
Yeah, but it's also interesting because everyone has their 

Kevin Dushney 01:23:49 
favorite. 

Nate McBride 01:23:50 
We're not yeah, we're not going to get into the discussion of budget it budgets and how fucked up they are these days. And who pays for what? But you brought up a good point, which is one function wants to go left or everyone else is going right. 

Nate McBride 01:24:05 
And with the way the world is, like, what, what real strength do you have in saying no, but don't answer that yet. Because we're going to come to that in a minute. I want to get to Kevin. So four years at chimera, you must have some tech debt legacy stuff you walked into, you absolutely have to. 

Nate McBride 01:24:25 
So what's the what's the address vector for you? Like, how do you get to that? Um, 

Kevin Dushney 01:24:32 
So every company I've started out, it's a ground up build, right? So it's been varying degrees of tech debt. And we were, I think we filed our first IND, one IND when I joined. So there wasn't a lot actually to deal with. 

Kevin Dushney 01:24:51 
It was more cleaning up process and rolling out the playbook. Like we didn't have any identity management, no MFA, typical MSP set up. So just ripping out a bunch of crap. So maybe that's tech debt or just bad technology. 

Nate McBride 01:25:11 
is anything that's a service that you inherit that you're not what you want to keep. 

Kevin Dushney 01:25:19 
I don't, I think that I think that's a acceptable definition. The other is something that it's very hard to get rid of. Yeah. You may be also run out of its lifetime. Like it's past a legacy system you can't get rid of, I think is also tech debt. 

Kevin Dushney 01:25:34 
Whereas, you know, Hey, we're, we're using just substandard software or we don't have identity management and our practices are bad that, you know, that's what you're inheriting and, but that's easily to rip out. 

Kevin Dushney 01:25:47 
That's easy to rip out. And the org change management isn't as hard. Um, especially now where, you know, for example, cybersecurity is so much more top of mind, you can get a lot of traction with, Hey, you know, everyone knows what octa is now, whereas like when that first came out, like, well, what is this, why do I need it? 

Kevin Dushney 01:26:05 
Now it's like, where is it? Hey, can't we get off the, like this, this Azure thing sucks. I'm with the octa is easy. I want the tiles and this is great. Um, so, so much easier to get those projects through. 

Kevin Dushney 01:26:18 
So if you come in with a clean roadmap, that's proven, um, explain it, you know, this is my strategy and I need some latitude that that's sort of what I did on the way in the door and, you know, it's going to cost some money, but we need to build a foundation that we can grow off of. 

Kevin Dushney 01:26:32 
And if you don't do it, guess what? This doesn't get any easier companies, a hundred and, you know, and change. You think this is easier when it's 300 people, I can tell you from experience. It is not. 

Kevin Dushney 01:26:45 
So let's bite the bullet, do this now, set the foundation, and then we can start building off of it is sort of how I approached it at Chimera. But honestly, I didn't have a lot of stuff. We're, we're cloud based for a lot of things, very small server room, um, not a lot of things running on prem, really any couple of VMs for just basic stuff, 80 printing, things like that. 

Kevin Dushney 01:27:10 
So this one, I was sort of lucky. I didn't, I didn't walk into a tech debt mess per se and walked into a, hey, this is not being managed well mess. And which is why they, they hired me into somebody said that earlier, right? 

Kevin Dushney 01:27:24 
You know, you're usually hired in when there's finally, they reach a boiling point or crisis point of like, we can't continue like this. We're a public company and you know, EY is forcing us off of QuickBooks and who's going to guide all this. 

Kevin Dushney 01:27:38 
So, you know, I don't know, maybe I had a little easier path here, um, in terms of the technology piece, the change management was still hard because I had a very, um, you know, uh, how do I phrase it? 

Kevin Dushney 01:27:54 
Um, the people was strong people. 

Joel Nichols 01:27:56 
on how I was gonna ask people have people have opinions, Kevin, that's amazing. Most of the time they say whatever you want. Sometimes. 

Kevin Dushney 01:28:02 
without a lot of experience, which is... 

Nate McBride 01:28:05 
Don't worry, Kevin, your tech debt day will come. No one escapes it. No, I've had them in. 

Kevin Dushney 01:28:11 
past, but for present day, it just it hasn't been. This one hasn't been bad. I cleaned up on the first two years, cleaned house, you know, built a foundation guide, you know, Net Sweden, Koopa, adaptive. 

Kevin Dushney 01:28:25 
So a lot of our financial stuff was cleaned up in a year, got identity management, did a lot of security work, you know, Arctic Wolf, so just really pushed the needle on, you know, and then we worked on response later, but just, I didn't have a lot to I was starting with basically nothing was more of a, you know, it was about authorization. 

Nate McBride 01:28:52 
Well, okay. So I took all of your notes. You're all in trouble. Cause I'm going to come back to you and all of these points later. But, um, I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about, um, now let's, let's look, we're going to look a little bit forward and we're going to, we're going to reflect on the current situation, but I want to look forward a little bit too now, so we'll start with service, 

Nate McBride 01:29:13 
IT service. So I'll start with myself, which is that for the last three companies, I have eliminated the help desk role. The help desk function for my company. I kind of grew tired with the model. I grew tired of having things, having a low priority, medium or high. 

Nate McBride 01:29:30 
I got tired of all that shit. I wanted to think of like a new way to do service, which was, um, give everything you can to the employee, make them as empowered as possible to solve their own problem. 

Nate McBride 01:29:43 
And then if they still can't do it, have them have a way to ask somebody in IT directly how to solve the problem. Like let's not turn questions into incidents. Let's turn questions into questions and leave the incidents for when it's an actual problem. 

Nate McBride 01:29:58 
So my model is that for the last three companies, I have not had a help desk. Traditional help desk. I've had different models in place that allow employees to solve all their problems on their own. And when they can't, they can finally reach out a sort of, um, uh, like Hail Mary effect to IT and we'll resolve it for them. 

Nate McBride 01:30:19 
So I'll start with you, Mike. Like thinking about, uh, let's talk about Carrick's and the Kibia. Well, we don't have to go back too far. Let's see my Carrick's and the Kibia and then the Cardurian today. 

Nate McBride 01:30:31 
And then tomorrow, where do you, where did you come from on the service side? Where are you today? And where do you think it will be a couple of years from now? 

Mike Crispin 01:30:42 
Yeah, big believer when possible to have service desk or support as close to the customer as possible if it's affordable and possible. So often for smaller, those being smaller companies had onsite personnel that worked and had multiple roles. 

Mike Crispin 01:31:00 
So maybe did some system administration work, did some other things as well or plugged into the cybersecurity team. So kind of generalist approach, but still had a service desk and ticket systems and managed the ticket queue. 

Mike Crispin 01:31:13 
And largely because I needed some form of, and those companies needed some form of analytics to prove sort of that we were getting value from certain service organizations, would be an MSP or if it was an insourced sort of solution. 

Mike Crispin 01:31:28 
So I have always had sort of a service desk or support group within the team, largely insourced when I can. And I've been forced at times to move it outside as well, just for cost reasons or just for scalability reasons. 

Mike Crispin 01:31:44 
But when things have moved out, it becomes more of a cybersecurity oversight type situation where there's the cyber team is always plugged in with them as well. So in the current state, it's more, let's bring it in. 

Mike Crispin 01:31:59 
We're a small company. We have a very tight knit culture within the company. We wanna help try and drive some of that employee experience, not just from technology, but just because a lot of people know the IT group and talk to them about a lot of things, even things more than technology. 

Mike Crispin 01:32:16 
And we've come almost a little more of a shoulder to lean on a little bit as well. So trying to also drive some of the culture through the service desk or through the IT group, which is kind of a function of what we do. 

Mike Crispin 01:32:30 
But it's not overwhelming at all that we do. So I think that it's definitely good to have that as an insourced function where we are right now. But as we grow, we may need to figure out more cost effective way to do it. 

Nate McBride 01:32:43 
Fast forward to 2028, you're still a cardarian. What's the IT service delivery model look like? How's it changed? 

Mike Crispin 01:32:51 
Um, good question. I think if it's larger, we'll, we'll potentially over the applications that are as easy to use as they are now. I think we'll also have more business technologists in the organization that won't need as much training. 

Mike Crispin 01:33:04 
They don't really really need to do that much right now. So I, I'm not sure there's going to be a huge need for it unless we start building more applications and more inter more intricate sort of integrations that people need to run, or they could just ask our chat bot, you know, in 10 years and get a lot of what they need done. 

Mike Crispin 01:33:22 
Um, they may have their own IT assistant by then that they can just ask and get, um, whatever answers they need, not just an IT assistant, but a company assistant, um, that they may just be able to get a lot of their problems solved. 

Nate McBride 01:33:38 
We'll call it a crisp robot. 

Mike Crispin 01:33:41 
The Micro Center Bot, yes. 

Nate McBride 01:33:46 
Okay. Kevin, same question to you. 

Kevin Dushney 01:33:50 
Um, so, I mean, now it's, it's, we have onsite people that do it, um, you know, provide a help desk. We've tried to build a knowledge base and to be, honestly, we've had limited success with self -service. 

Kevin Dushney 01:34:05 
Even though we've built lots of KBB articles and provided links and training at the end of the day, somebody wants to come up to someone and get, um, you know, a human interaction and get somebody to help them. 

Kevin Dushney 01:34:20 
Um, I know you've had better luck than, than maybe I have at that. So curious how you do it, but, um, I find that people can't get away from wanting that white glove experience. And maybe that's just a small biotech thing. 

Kevin Dushney 01:34:34 
And as you get bigger and need to scale, I think that model becomes cost prohibitive. You can't just keep hiring help desk people or, I mean, God help you if you're using an MSP and you're a thousand employees, right? 

Kevin Dushney 01:34:47 
It's, you're, you're burning so much money. It's not even funny, but you know, is it some sort of hybrid? I mean, that's, that's sort of how I think about it, where you have at least some presence in the building to go to. 

Kevin Dushney 01:35:01 
Um, but then, you know, some of the more benign tickets can get, you know, outsourced to a low cost provider that can provide those answers or remote help. Um, well, and I'm hopeful we can move the needle at some point in that as the tools get more sophisticated with, with AI asking bots questions and, you know, I know you do a lot of videos or surfacing videos of like, Hey, it's that time of the year. 

Kevin Dushney 01:35:31 
I bought a new iPhone. How the hell do I move my MFA over from opted to my new phone, right? Getting people to go look for that versus, Hey, my phone's broken, you know, which is not efficient. 

Mike Crispin 01:35:44 
They just want to talk to a lot of the time to do it. 

Kevin Dushney 01:35:48 
efficient and it's costly. So it's, I agree with that. I don't have a right now. I don't have a great answer to how to 

Nate McBride 01:35:56 
So I'll ask you're gonna. 

Kevin Dushney 01:35:58 
someone to write what's what's the philosophy and the tone and bio -text are always a hundred miles an hour so it's like I don't have time to wait for somebody to you know get back to me from India or whatever the case may be I need an answer fix now 

Nate McBride 01:36:11 
Well, I'll ask both of you to think about this, but I'm gonna have Joel answer first, which is, um, so are you thinking about how to transition to that new service model three or four years from now? 

Nate McBride 01:36:24 
Like is it in your conscious mind right now? And, and, and Kevin and Mike don't answer yet, but Joel, and when you answer this question, like, how do you see your model changing? I also want you to answer, um, are you thinking about the changes you have to make now to accommodate for the future? 

Joel Nichols 01:36:44 
So yeah so I'm thrilled we're having this question because in you know several years from now this podcast will either show the foresight I had and what a great leader I am or else I will bribe you to delete it from the internet. 

Joel Nichols 01:37:00 
There's a lot of new points. 

Kevin Dushney 01:37:02 
He's a leader from the internet, Joel, haven't you? Yeah, probably. Yeah. 

Joel Nichols 01:37:06 
Um, no, I, cause I, cause I actually did give it a lot of thought and we had not had any service desk here when I landed. We had one for MSP itself, but my organization's made up of, uh, as I mentioned, I've got lab automation. 

Joel Nichols 01:37:20 
I have lab it, I have it. I have, um, you know, we've got software engineering, we have data engineering. So there's actually several functions and I wanted to create a, what I call one digital approach because a lot of the feedback I had when I landed was, I don't know who to go to talk to for which thing. 

Joel Nichols 01:37:37 
And so I told my team as a, first of all, if anyone comes and talk to you, you're part of digital. So the answer is yes. It doesn't mean you know how to do it, but, but now we have to have a mechanism. 

Joel Nichols 01:37:47 
And so we implemented, I mean, it's jury service management because we kind of had it, I'm like, it's not my favorite. It works, but what was a little bit different than I wanted to do is I'm thinking about what the future, and I'm going to step on that in a minute, but built a form, the form is simple. 

Joel Nichols 01:38:05 
I don't want people telling me if it's a sev two. I don't want somebody being me back in the day saying they have a sev one label printer issue, um, I, you know, 

Kevin Dushney 01:38:15 
No, I can't get badges for my guests in sub one. 

Joel Nichols 01:38:20 
Yeah. So the form's simple. It's just summarize the problem, you know, which is, and then the next section is now add details and describe how it's impacting your work. Once they get that and then there's, are there any additional supporting details you want to put in, including screenshots or attachments. 

Joel Nichols 01:38:39 
And so all goes in there, and then it asks what's the best way to contact them. So it's still submitting a ticket, if you will. Now today what's been done. Yeah. 

Kevin Dushney 01:38:50 
Sorry to interrupt you, Joel. Can I ask you a question of how you, because I'm intrigued, I think the form piece is important, but for for tickets, how did you move the organization from emails, well, drive bys, emails to forms, like that organization is hard. 

Joel Nichols 01:39:10 
It is. And, um, they actually were very open to that, I think, because they had reached a frustration of not knowing who to go talk to and talking to the wrong person in a telephone game. My lab automation group was very open to it because they were getting people asking them things and they inadvertently would forget to do it because they were on to something else, you know, they're, they're gowned up. 

Joel Nichols 01:39:31 
And so, yeah. So I think that was probably made it a lot easier. So what, what's happening today is I have my first level triage team and it's also like they're, they're reading this and they're, they're putting the information into the ticket, so an offshore or low cost model. 

Joel Nichols 01:39:48 
It's putting it in place. What, what I hope to, to answer kind of Nate's question for the future is as we have a database of what the tickets are, how they're resolved and what goes on combined with what was initially asked, this seems like a good case for AI to use data to be able to first answer questions and second assign the ticket automatically. 

Joel Nichols 01:40:11 
And so I'm, I'm trying to have some foresight thinking this is what I can do for the future. We're, we're only 350 people. So realities, I've got a long ways to build enough data for it to be meaningful, but that is what I hope the future is. 

Joel Nichols 01:40:24 
I still think that the ticket works, but the ticket becomes a, can you just get it to whoever can do it second? 

Kevin Dushney 01:40:35 
Well, that's where it gets good, right? If many people are asking the same question. 

Joel Nichols 01:40:42 
And one other thing I'm going to throw on just related to, because you talk about they still want to talk to people. So I'm kicking off a program. I know you guys talked about Cis and IT last week. So I'm using digital champions. 

Joel Nichols 01:40:54 
And part of their role is that, is that they sit in the lab or they sit in their function and there's somebody that a person can talk to. Enable them enough to have enough basic information where, yeah, how do I move my phone to Okta? 

Joel Nichols 01:41:07 
Oh, cool, I just did that last week. If you get this app, it's honestly super easy. That is, that's cost -effective. It's good for young leaders in certain groups to get a chance to do that. And it, yeah, it takes the burden off of the organization. 

Mike Crispin 01:41:23 
Yeah, we've definitely been finding something similar, Joel. We've got like Ask IT. We pretty much just have everything come into Slack through Ask IT and we've got different people in the business, like answering questions for us, which is great, right? 

Mike Crispin 01:41:36 
They're like, yeah, I know how to do that. And they get a thumbs up or a green check mark and they're all, they're all excited. And when we need to turn those over to our ticket, uh, we do within the, within Slack and the conversation continues. 

Mike Crispin 01:41:50 
And I was nervous about that change management. Um, the current company didn't chat period at all. Everything was email. And once they saw that interaction between people outside of IT and this kind of mini crowdsource model, it caught on pretty quick. 

Mike Crispin 01:42:06 
And now it's kind of the go -to place where unfortunately now it's like, it's all tickets, it's like, I want to get something out there for everyone to see what's going on and it's all, you know, but people are getting the opportunity to, to work together, which is huge. 

Nate McBride 01:42:23 
So, wow, okay, awesome. On all points, we all are going to have to come back to this point in time and talk about it because you're all hitting on the same idea, which is right now, today, you definitely have evolved from your previous service model. 

Nate McBride 01:42:46 
Everyone's got sort of a different evolution in terms of how they think about it. The question will be, as employees get savvier, as technology gets simpler, and that's a relative term now I'm using, and sort of more ubiquitous in terms of what people are used to using at home versus work, et cetera. 

Nate McBride 01:43:08 
How is the need going to change and how is their access to things going to change? And we're not gonna answer those tonight, but things that we're gonna think about and have to come back to probably multiple times. 

Nate McBride 01:43:23 
And we'll start this by saying this next question. Mike and I talked about this two episodes ago. We asked the question about using the generative AI for decision making. Does generative AI have a positive impact on strategic or otherwise any kind of IT decision making? 

Nate McBride 01:43:45 
Can you use it for making decisions? Can you use it for automating processes or is it more of a clever toy? So thinking about what we just talked about with service and how we think about shaping the support world and landscape of our staff and employees, does anybody, and I'll open this up to the whole group, speak out loud, but do you see AI or machine learning improving your decision making? 

Nate McBride 01:44:18 
And this is anything from like, it should be a ticket, it should not be a ticket, all the way up to, it's a project, it's not a project or it's gonna take six months versus nine months. Like, do you see it, you see using it as an impact? 

Nate McBride 01:44:32 
Let me, I'll stop right there. 

Joel Nichols 01:44:34 
I, I just saw something today. I'm not going to throw out the name of the vendor. They haven't given me a cool t -shirt yet. So, um, but they, um, they had a use case that myself and my head of IT were really intrigued in, um, because it, it goes in and, you know, it's all about largely when we say AI, the big breakthrough has been large language models and, you know, the transformer technology that, 

Joel Nichols 01:44:59 
that kind of is pushing a lot of these. So one of the issues that a lot of companies have as they try to mature is data classification and data categorization, right? So they've leveraged AI to have somewhere between 95 and 97% as you train the model accuracy on classifying your data. 

Joel Nichols 01:45:21 
Is it confidential, restricted, et cetera. And also is it HR data? Is it a regulatory data? Um, I'm intrigued by that. So kind of from a decision -making, because I think 95% is better than the average employee does when they make their own classification. 

Joel Nichols 01:45:37 
And so as you can start to put a document together or an email, it reads it before it's saved or basically committed and makes the recommendation on what the classification is. And I think that does help from a decision -making standpoint in theory. 

Joel Nichols 01:45:54 
So. 

Mike Crispin 01:45:56 
That's very cool, very cool. 

Nate McBride 01:46:00 
Yeah, don't don't mention vendors unless you have the t shirt on during the podcast and or you're drinking their beer or whiskey. 

Joel Nichols 01:46:09 
Also, that would help. Yeah, for sure. 

Nate McBride 01:46:11 
Um, otherwise, yeah, you can, I mean, we've dropped like 40 vendor names already in this podcast. Uh, we're getting paid for none of them, but okay, Kevin. So over to you, like, are you using either gen AI, AI, or ML today to help in decision making in any way whatsoever? 

Kevin Dushney 01:46:30 
No, not in any meaningful way. Not yet, especially on the service side, if that's like the primary lens you're looking through. But You know, I think there is a ton of data that we've already gathered within our, you know, help desk system over the last four years that you know, we could, we could apply AI to and learn a lot of things, like how many times are people asking the same question and what do we do about it. 

Kevin Dushney 01:47:01 
So In terms of decision making that could be the simple as, hey, so many people have asked this question, let's, let's create a new knowledge based article and publish it. Right. So it's self service. 

Kevin Dushney 01:47:15 
So if it's a very common thing. Simple, simple use case, but that's one example. 

Nate McBride 01:47:23 
But that's an outcome use case. I'm talking about, you're sitting down, you're saying, do I go A or B? Oh, yeah. Are you, or even someone in your organization is saying, oh God, I don't know which way to go for this huge process. 

Nate McBride 01:47:39 
Do I, let me switch over to Gen AI to help me decide. Are you seeing that yet, basically? Not yet, no. 

Speaker 6 01:47:48 
Yeah, yeah. 

Kevin Dushney 01:47:49 
We're more in the camp of where do we have key challenges or back to the clinical trial example if we're going head to head with a drug that's already out there. How do we optimize our trials so we're successful? 

Kevin Dushney 01:48:09 
Still from an outcome point of view and using it that way. So not like, hey let's use AI to choose you know A or B but more where are the opportunities to apply as I think where we're at as a company. 

Mike Crispin 01:48:25 
I think in that context, right, it can add context to your decision -making if you don't have the background and that's, that's, it can help that decision, may not make the decision, but it helps give you maybe some context you didn't have, didn't have that knowledge. 

Nate McBride 01:48:40 
So let me ask this question, Kevin, if somebody else in your organization who's not IT, use generative AI to ask questions, prove their decision -making about a strategy and came to you and said, I used AI to make these decisions about, or help me make decisions about this particular strategy if it's technology, I need you to endorse it. 

Nate McBride 01:49:04 
What's your response to that? 

Kevin Dushney 01:49:09 
So, you know, there's obviously the hallucination piece to consider, right? So any output from, you know, AI, if you're the domain expert, I think it's easier for you to spot those hallucinations and deal with it. 

Kevin Dushney 01:49:26 
If you're not a domain expert and you're going off and saying, you know, hey, I don't know, I'm trying to use AI to make a decision on which HRIS system I should use. And I come to you with a conclusion that has been drawn by my AI work. 

Kevin Dushney 01:49:41 
I say, okay, that's fine, but let's, we still need a pressure test what the output looks like. So a good jumpstart and maybe it narrowed the field down and helped you that way. And I'm okay with that. 

Kevin Dushney 01:49:52 
If you got a from six vendors down to three, great. But we're still having the same conversation of how do we proceed forward? So I don't know, maybe the AI, in that case, you know, put some stuff through the funnel. 

Kevin Dushney 01:50:07 
And now we have a smaller set to work with. And I think that's perfectly appropriate. But if you're saying, hey, I've come to this conclusion, let's go. No, I mean, you can't just blindly take it and charge ahead. 

Kevin Dushney 01:50:20 
It's just not that simple. 

Nate McBride 01:50:25 
So Mike, that's a great answer. Thanks, Kevin. Mike, based on what Kevin said, again, the same, it had a quality comes to you and says, Oh, I used, or maybe they don't even say it, but like, I think this is the best option to go with, and I had the data to back it up. 

Nate McBride 01:50:42 
And then it turns out they used and generate AI agent to help them derive the best platform for QMS. Um, what's your response? 

Mike Crispin 01:50:54 
Depends on what the response is. Can AI, and it's a good response, sounds great. I mean, that's part of why you're there, Kevin's point, right, is, hey, if sometimes things come from AI, the things that AI can answer, you know, just for a minute, I think, if you ask it to compare SharePoint and Documentum, it'll give you a good description of both. 

Mike Crispin 01:51:21 
And it's pretty good. These aren't hard questions for AI, I don't think. Like if they can give you a lot of description, and it's up to still the decision makers to make the decision, but it gives you context and information. 

Mike Crispin 01:51:33 
So if someone comes to me with their QMS background and says, I have these two systems, OpenAI or Cloud or any of these other platforms, they're probably going to write up something pretty good. It may not be 100%, but if stuff comes out, hey, that's good information usually that comes from that background. 

Mike Crispin 01:51:50 
Can it hallucinate? Absolutely. But I look at a lot of the stuff that it outputs, that's more than I got in the past. Yeah. But at the end of the day... 

Kevin Dushney 01:51:59 
you still have to figure out which one's best for your company. Exactly. Yes, it's given you a lot of data to think about, but at the end, you still have to do the work of. 

Mike Crispin 01:52:09 
How does it fit in with, with your, well, that's. 

Kevin Dushney 01:52:12 
texture, what do we already have, like, although it has no knowledge of it's not trained on that. So if you 

Joel Nichols 01:52:20 
And that's the Nate's point. I mean, I think AI assistance is different, but actually making the decision. Although a little bit tongue in cheek, but I think it's thought provocative, Nate, which is, yeah, the head of quality brings me that. 

Joel Nichols 01:52:33 
Depending on the head of quality, I may trust the AI better than our own assessment. So we do have a number of people who are experts who have opinions, who aren't necessarily making great choices either. 

Joel Nichols 01:52:49 
They're not even looking at the set of data. They're looking at the past experience. They're hallucinating, if you will, to some extent. 

Kevin Dushney 01:52:56 
So let me put it this way, I would be happier with you if you ran that analysis through open AI and came to me with that, then said, Hey, I was at Mark. This was great. I want to hear 

Mike Crispin 01:53:09 
at my last company. 

Kevin Dushney 01:53:12 
So now you've actually done some work and you're coming and now now we're having a conversation versus hey use this at my last company and 

Joel Nichols 01:53:21 
every time. 

Kevin Dushney 01:53:22 
right? And then what happens, right? So that was, you know, 100 ,000 people, you're at a company now that is 200, right? So where I would be impressed is if you did some work and said, I know this is overkill. 

Kevin Dushney 01:53:36 
What, what do you know, open AI told me that this is maybe comparable or more right sized for the size of the business. And can we have that conversation? I think it's really helpful than just saying, give this to me. 

Nate McBride 01:53:52 
Give me the best answers possible. I'm loving this shit because what I just wrote down was a Kevin dash AI beats opinion of past performance. So I'm going to come back and hit you with that later because this is a good one. 

Nate McBride 01:54:06 
I wanted you to say that. So thank you. I think it has legs. I mean, sure. So, um, uh, last question on this sort of topic about, uh, the future of this IT, like the near term. Um, and Mike and I have talked about this exhaustively because I just can't let it go. 

Nate McBride 01:54:26 
But employee experience or EX. Yeah. Okay. So I think it's the future of everything. Um, I, like, I don't know if you agree or not. We have, okay. You agree. Okay. We'll still be friends then. Um, uh, because so, so Kevin and Joel and, and Mike chime into all three of you, basically, I'll throw this out there again. 

Nate McBride 01:54:52 
Uh, I won't pick somebody, but so we, like, I didn't, I'll be honest. Like I didn't think about EX until just a few years ago, like from my entire career, my goal was that, um, the ticket comes in and should be resolved as fast as possible, like SLAs mattered. 

Nate McBride 01:55:13 
And these were SLAs that were created out of a vacuum, but they were SLAs that mattered like, okay, person, but ticket in like get it solved. I didn't care so much that they were happy about that or that it took too long or it was too fast or the way I responded. 

Nate McBride 01:55:28 
I just wanted to resolve. There was like a resolution effect. Yeah. But only in the last maybe five years did it start to dawn on me that there's something more to this, like you can start, you can be a little bit slower on ticket, but if you're better on the resolution, the employee will be happier. 

Nate McBride 01:55:45 
Like there's this gray area that started to emerge and I started to get confused about like, what's my role in their experience? What's my role in their onboarding? They're off boarding. Like, uh, when something happens, it's so transformative to them. 

Nate McBride 01:55:58 
My, my, my, my position in that and that's EX. So think about your previous 20 years, 20 plus years in each of your roles. And then think about today. Yeah. If you could draw a line between like some previous moment in today in terms of your importance of how you place EX in your day to day decision making. 

Nate McBride 01:56:25 
Like, what would you describe where you rank EX and your decision making today in that, in that context? 

Kevin Dushney 01:56:36 
Anyone? I mean, I already get a lot higher now because you think about the complaints of, I mean, it's probably still a monochrome of this, but why is the technology I have at home better than what you're trying to get me at work, right? 

Kevin Dushney 01:56:51 
So I think the response to that is, well, it shouldn't be. So how do we fix that? One way I approach it is onboarding, which is like, how do we make this the best experience for you, including, I'll give you an example. 

Kevin Dushney 01:57:08 
If we know someone's a chemist, right? And we just give them a base laptop that an office worker gets, and they have none of their software, what is that experience? It sucks, right? They're gonna open up 15 tickets. 

Kevin Dushney 01:57:23 
It's gonna take them a week to get all the software they need. That's not a good onboarding, that's not a good experience. So what we're trying to do actively is pair up with our PNC team and say, okay, how do we get as much advanced notice and build a framework where if we know the department, the person's going in, we can get them 90% plus of the way there. 

Kevin Dushney 01:57:48 
So they're productive in week one. And then following up with them, how did it go? How was your experience? How were you onboarded? What are you missing? Do you have the right software? And I think doing that outreach and having that touch point, like how did we do? 

Kevin Dushney 01:58:03 
Do we get this right? Where can we improve and constantly iterating on that? It pays huge dividends, right? So it's screwed off and you're asking a question. 

Nate McBride 01:58:14 
right? Expand on the dividends. Like why is it important to you? 

Kevin Dushney 01:58:20 
Because why is it important because I think I think it's it's one of our goals now in it is to ensure that people have the tools they need to do their job and be productive as quickly as possible. And in those tools are also should be current easy to use integrated where appropriate single sign on. 

Kevin Dushney 01:58:41 
So it's not like I need a billion passwords again so You know, just smoothing out like I come to the company. I have the tech I need. And then where I see that evolving is using things like, you know, co pilot lean or you name it bought where in week one and week two, they can ask all kinds of questions. 

Kevin Dushney 01:59:02 
Based on, you know, knowledge that you have built up across all these different repositories and teach themselves like I don't need to bug some person 1000 times and finance like what's when was when is our window opener close I can I can ask co pilot tomorrow. 

Kevin Dushney 01:59:19 
It'll, it'll give me the answer. Right. Right now, I'll give me the answer. I need a stock window close yesterday. What's our insider trading policy like all those questions. Where do I find this or how do I learn more about this target. 

Kevin Dushney 01:59:31 
We're working on To me, that's all a part of an employee experience versus I have to go around and talk to people to get all that information. If we can use tech to do it. That's, that's where I think I can add a lot of value. 

Nate McBride 01:59:47 
OK, OK. That's what you're after. That is why I'm after. Thank you. That was that was good. And we also don't say co -pile on the show. We see a Voldemort. I know. We have to sort of attend. I'm trying to think of a euphemism. 

Nate McBride 01:59:59 
But I'll bet it out and I'll buy it out and post post -production. 

Kevin Dushney 02:00:04 
I did say or clean, which is founded by Google people. So I thought maybe that would be a good, fair balance. 

Nate McBride 02:00:09 
No, that doesn't save you. It's okay. I got it at a machine going full black, uh, Joe or Mike. 

Joel Nichols 02:00:20 
I mean, I'll maybe go it's trying to piggyback. So I don't be redundant for some of the things Kevin said, but it's, it's technology is now ubiquitous. You know, in the past, it was, hey, here's, here's the six systems we have in the company, you need to learn how to use them, we'll provide you training. 

Joel Nichols 02:00:40 
But oh, you don't like the fact that I will drop this name track wise, back in the day. Right? Well, just free text, free text, free text everything in what's the problem? Yeah, exactly. You know, you just you're free text and everything in place there and everywhere. 

Joel Nichols 02:00:59 
And you're like, I'm like, well, shouldn't this be better? Yeah, it's not just keep doing it. There was no employee experience with that. It was suck it up. It's our system. And it's really changed because now it's, it's so prevalent through everything we're doing that it needs to be easier to use. 

Joel Nichols 02:01:17 
Also drop this analogy. And so I was kind of thinking as you started that question, Nate, you know, why it's so important. When I think about traditional it and how it used to be in the world I just described previously, that's like a good restaurant that has great food. 

Joel Nichols 02:01:32 
Hey, we're it, you know, when you said like, hey, we SLAs, we met him like our food quality is great. You know what that won't get you a Michelin rating. The expectation now is the service and it's not something that is easily Yeah, there's criteria in the Michelin, but to really offer good service if you've been to a Michelin restaurant, it's hard as someone who's not fully trained in that criteria to understand why it's such great service. 

Joel Nichols 02:01:59 
But it is, it just is and I walk away going, I mean, the food was fine. Why did I love it? I want to go back. And that's something about the experience. 

Nate McBride 02:02:13 
All right. Say track wise again. Track wise. 

Joel Nichols 02:02:16 
Trek wise from the guy wearing the beaver shirt 

Mike Crispin 02:02:23 
Okay, I agree with everything everyone said just one thing I'll add is just sometimes the employee experience just a focal focus area or not additional focus area is the ability to connect people and the ability to connect have a place for people to connect and talk and be themselves and and not just socialize but kind of build organically build a culture and a company and I think technology leaders have a big opportunity there to help drive some of that conversation or listen more so than drive the conversation but listen and provide those experiences for people who are on the other side of the globe to bring them closer together to have offices that may be on the same floor but have different offices and across the hallway, 

Mike Crispin 02:03:06 
but can still stay connected and create kind of uniform digital experience for people where they, they really get an employee experience. What it's like to work at a company whether they're in the office or their remote, or they're part of events where they can't be physically local to people and there's some real opportunities there and a lot of the tools and approaches, how we manage people, etc. 

Mike Crispin 02:03:30 
that I think sometimes comes out of it organizations first and is adopted those approaches are adopted elsewhere in the organization says the employee experience experience leadership and in that facet as well, an opportunity for us. 

Nate McBride 02:03:47 
Oh, um. 

Kevin Dushney 02:03:52 
I mean, you know this Nate, you've pursued this. I think IT is playing more of an HR type role than it ever has experience. 

Nate McBride 02:04:03 
I mean, basically at this point, I feel like, oh boy, I mean, it, the lines are becoming so blurred. 

Kevin Dushney 02:04:15 
Yes. 

Nate McBride 02:04:16 
And this is like, we're going to get into this next week, but where does my role start and stop? If I have, if I have somebody who's got 15 years out of a lab and they're so good at ELN and they're so good at bioinformatics and, uh, analytics and they're like a Tableau master. 

Nate McBride 02:04:37 
Why do like, where does my, I don't want to mess with that person. I want to like create a pathway for that person. I want to make room for that person to go and just kill it. I don't want to, I don't want to be like an obstacle, right? 

Nate McBride 02:04:53 
And, uh, my 10 years ago self would not have done the same thing. My 10 years ago self would have said, well, we've got rules here. I mean, you can't fucking go send it for a Tableau account without getting all these approvals and it's not in the budget and blah, blah, blah. 

Nate McBride 02:05:15 
Oh, hold on. Um, sorry. 

Kevin Dushney 02:05:24 
it's just devoid of sound effects that we normally have that in person. 

Nate McBride 02:05:29 
experience. I don't know. I didn't have the link on this laptop, because I haven't sat at this desk for me, Mike, it doesn't matter. Anyway, so many vendor drops, I gotta start putting this in. But my point is that, like, I, and the reason we're having this discussion, I've wanted to have for like months now, and Mike's been hoping I wouldn't have it is because we are at our crossroads of what the fuck do we do next. 

Nate McBride 02:06:00 
And I'm not so much for trying to prepare for the inevitability of the conclusion of leadership roles, but more so for the changes in the department. And so I realized we're coming up on like we're past two hours, but I know everyone's time is valuable. 

Nate McBride 02:06:18 
But I do want to ask one more question. Well, I know I said four things tonight, but we'll skip the third and we'll go right to four. And then we'll kind of continue next week. Because I think we've got enough information, everybody set the context for the real big questions we're going to tackle next week. 

Nate McBride 02:06:34 
But there's one more thing I want to talk about tonight. And that is on building your organization. Not only building out what you currently have, but building for the future of what you think you're going to need. 

Nate McBride 02:06:50 
And so, you know, again, we've all been through the gamut, we've hired, we've inherited, we've let go, we've changed, we've done all these things, the people that we've come in contact with in our departments and, and our functions and our growth in our careers over time. 

Nate McBride 02:07:05 
And we've all figured out what we like, what we don't like, we all we all kind of have our own opinions about what works great for my vision, or what doesn't that work. But sometimes it's put that aside, just to take the bigger picture into play. 

Nate McBride 02:07:21 
So how do you each strike a balance? And we'll start with Joel on this. How do you strike a balance between hiring for technical skills now, technical, tactical, such tactical, versus business acumen? 

Nate McBride 02:07:35 
Like, where does the business versus tactical come into play now? And you don't have to compare 10 years ago, just about now, you can talk about like 10 years ago, if it matters, but and then ask, ask, when did it change? 

Nate McBride 02:07:49 
And, and will it change? 

Joel Nichols 02:07:54 
Oh, such a good question. I mean, you know, I, I showed, I remember showing someone the the old Nick Burns SNL skit with Jimmy Fallon back in the day. Right. And it's hilarious because we kind of put up with that. 

Joel Nichols 02:08:09 
Right. Exactly. Yeah. But we put up with that. And reality is, there was some there was it was funny because there was enough truth in it. And that role wouldn't survive today. No, it's, you know, it's like your technical acumen doesn't outweigh your lack of, you know, how you interact, you know, so there's the how. 

Joel Nichols 02:08:35 
And it wasn't exactly what you're asking, because you're getting into the business acumen. But I do think that's an important piece. And maybe that ties into the overall user experience, you know, the person experience. 

Joel Nichols 02:08:47 
But specific to the business acumen, I don't think I can hire someone anymore who just wants to sit in the back room and do tech. Nope, because they will lack the ability to think on their feet on whether or not it actually makes sense. 

Joel Nichols 02:09:04 
We don't, I don't have the luxury and I don't know how big a company and have to be to where I'd be able to have that luxury of somebody like that I they they've got to have an understanding of what we're doing, because I can't always take the time myself or my direct leaders to prioritize for them and tell them what the priority is. 

Joel Nichols 02:09:24 
Yeah, sure, we try to do that. But they've got to be able to think and go, wow, this is absolutely what we're trying to do in this space. And this is being held up. I hear you. Yep, we're gonna this is this is going to create tech debt, but it gets it done today. 

Joel Nichols 02:09:37 
So I'm going to go ahead and do it. I don't need them to run that up the chain to me because that's what they should do. Well, we'll figure out how to fix it long term later, but they did what was needed to have a critical piece of the business flow. 

Mike Crispin 02:09:50 
Yeah leaders. Yeah, definitely. Yeah 

Kevin Dushney 02:09:53 
I think the big thing too is your team nowadays needs to be business -facing as much as possible. You know, if they don't know what your team does, I mean, think about the ramifications, just trying to get more resources. 

Kevin Dushney 02:10:07 
Well, what do these people that I don't see do? Right or wrong, I think your department, the way it's constructed now versus 10 or 15 years ago, is like, I don't want to have people in the back room that are unseen. 

Kevin Dushney 02:10:21 
I want people that are as outwardly facing as possible and partnering with the, whether it's research or clinical or whatever group, they know that your team, every team member you have is actively engaged in the business and they could be in a technical manner or, you know, you know, a business analyst, whatever you want, but they're interfacing with your business, not just, you know, running a database in the back room. 

Kevin Dushney 02:10:49 
Like, those days are long gone. 

Joel Nichols 02:10:52 
And I'm going to add to that, Kevin. I should have put this in. That's actually the salient point between outsourced. If you just want to be technical, now people ask me all the time, what am I insourcing and outsourcing? 

Joel Nichols 02:11:05 
I'm like business acumen, business partners, people who are part of the business, hiring. Someone who just wants to flip bits, outsourcing. And I'm going to leverage a geography where it's cost effective. 

Kevin Dushney 02:11:18 
Yeah, I mean the more commoditized things or the less thinking it involves, the easier it is to outsource. But strategy, you know, business acumen, like, no, you can't outsource that. You can augment it with a consultant, but you can't just, you know, dispose of discharge it and say, oh, this is taken care of. 

Kevin Dushney 02:11:37 
No. 

Mike Crispin 02:11:39 
has to have that strong front wheel, right, and a strong ability to connect with people and be human and be part of the team part of the company is a huge component. It also buys credits if they're able to listen, but they have to be able to listen. 

Mike Crispin 02:11:53 
I think that sometimes you get very heavy in technology and they know, they know, they don't have that bed side manner that we need. And when it comes to a business analyst or business partner, it's like sometimes business partners have worked with in the past have been like, yeah, I did all this before. 

Mike Crispin 02:12:10 
And it's like, yeah, you still need the soft side of, you know, being able to listen and understand think times change. Right. You don't just have that good experience to connect with people. And that's something you can't really train on or teach. 

Mike Crispin 02:12:24 
So that really comes through. And when you bring people, the right people then. 

Kevin Dushney 02:12:29 
Yeah, of course, the technical part is the easiest thing to train on, but those soft skills, the engagement, the how part, I mean, that's lead by example, but there's no prescription for training for that other than feedback and the other things, but you got to figure that out, and you have to guide people like, look, whether it's your help desk, and if you have an MSP, it's like your help desk cannot treat the MSP like shit. 

Kevin Dushney 02:13:01 
These are team members, right? And if you're getting passive aggressive in the IT chat, like, no, that's not how we work together. Like, you know, that's incumbent upon you as a leader to set that tone. 

Kevin Dushney 02:13:15 
Honestly, otherwise, I think you lose control very quickly of like, you know, just here are the table stakes, right? Here's my operating model for how we engage amongst ourselves, but also with people in the business. 

Kevin Dushney 02:13:30 
And, you know, being an asshole is just not acceptable in any cheaper form, because you burn your bank down so quick. When you do that, it's like, it's so hard to build it up even from this from this department. 

Kevin Dushney 02:13:45 
And it's so easy to wipe out with one jerk on your team. So I'm really, you know, protective of that and have a zero tolerance policy on, you know, look, I don't care how angry you are, don't send that email. 

Kevin Dushney 02:13:59 
Draft it if you need to feel better, but come back. Look at it again. Use AI, by the way, soften this. Like, that can be your friend. Grab a link, send it. Don't just fire it off in anger, right? That's that's not going to, and then I have to do the damage control with the department head on that. 

Kevin Dushney 02:14:16 
So. 

Mike Crispin 02:14:17 
No, Joe, Joe touched on just the ability to, to have someone that is a leader. You can give them something. They're going to get it done. They don't have to come to you. And with, with that front wheel comes that is up. 

Mike Crispin 02:14:28 
You can depend. There's a level of trust. There's delegate delegate all that and people take it and they run with it. And they're happy to do it and produce the result. I mean, that's, that's 

Kevin Dushney 02:14:41 
sort of though, right? So I'm, you know, my style is like, I absolutely hate to micromanage and I hate being micromanaged. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, you try to hire good people that are experienced and you trust and you don't abandon them. 

Kevin Dushney 02:14:55 
But you can find yourself in a situation where it's like, okay, I give them too much rope and now they've fucked things up and now you need to reel that back in. So it's, it's, there's no perfect answer here. 

Kevin Dushney 02:15:09 
But, you know, you want to hire smart people responsible. And as you said, now they feel empowered. But, you know, there's a lot of communication between you as a leader and your directs that, okay, are we, where are the challenges? 

Kevin Dushney 02:15:24 
Are you asking for help? You know, what, where can I help you? And if you're not saying anything, like I always tell this to my team, if you don't tell me what's wrong, I gotta, I gotta sneak up. Tireder than it sounds. 

Kevin Dushney 02:15:39 
Very easy to say. 

Nate McBride 02:15:40 
No, it's, it's segue into the last question from this bank. I mean, I have two questions really at the end. Uh, but this is the second to last question that we'll ask tonight and that is, and Kevin will start with you because you just mentioned it. 

Nate McBride 02:15:52 
So, um, when people come to you in your department, like what's your position towards, uh, them having to know something, like, do you expect people in your department to know everything or at least be able to find things out really quickly and understand the context? 

Nate McBride 02:16:14 
Do you, um, do you want them to train themselves regularly? Do you expect them to take training that you give them? Like what's your overall approach towards making sure people can in your department respond to just about anything? 

Kevin Dushney 02:16:30 
Oh, you mean on my team? 

Speaker 6 02:16:33 
Yeah. 

Kevin Dushney 02:16:35 
Um, that's a good question. I mean, I think, you know, if there's gaps, so first of all, clear roles and responsibilities is, is important and, uh, I'm fully supportive of training. So, you know, if it, if you see gaps in, especially in tech, that's the easiest one to solve and I think if it's gaps in, um, communication, the how, then your job as the department leader is to help coach them. 

Kevin Dushney 02:17:05 
Or you can, I mean, if you have really good HR BPs, you can partner with them too and say, Hey, I need, I need some help because sometimes they don't take it as well from their boss or their boss's boss as, you know, Hey, I can go talk to an HR BP if I am the catalyst for this and say, Hey, just need to work on some soft skills here. 

Kevin Dushney 02:17:27 
So I guess it depends on what it is. But my expectation is that at a high level that my department can serve all the business needs, right? And if I can't do that, then I either don't have the right people, they're not trained properly and then that's an analysis. 

Kevin Dushney 02:17:45 
Do I need to add to the team and add a skillset? Do I need to train somebody up or is somebody maxed out and it's, look, you're, you got us here, but you're not going to get us there and it's time for a change. 

Kevin Dushney 02:17:58 
So I think there's a number of lovers there you can, you can kind of tug on to get to the right answer, but at the end of the day, you know, my group needs to be able to service as we grow from preclinical to clinical to commercial, I need to be ahead of and at a minimum it locks up, but ideally ahead of that growth curve so I can, you know, service that and the team you have today might not be the same team you have two years from now. 

Kevin Dushney 02:18:26 
That's just, that's the bitch of it. Right. You hope you can train those people up, but some people don't want to. Um, they are, I'm here. I'm not doing any more and you've got to deal with that. 

Nate McBride 02:18:39 
Mike, what do you think about that? What's your approach towards continuous improvement in your team? 

Mike Crispin 02:18:47 
I think the overall of who it depends on who you've got on your team over to what your roles are. But I think ultimately, people being able to self learn, self teach is important. But you want to have some sort of level of redundancy as well. 

Mike Crispin 02:18:59 
And from a continuity perspective, when I was a team of one, it's like, I got to get a number two because, you know, there's a password safe, you know. Now if the number two leads, you're screwed. That's right. 

Mike Crispin 02:19:10 
So you've got to have some of that redundancy in place. And yeah, that number two leaves you, you're back to square one, to some extent, you're going to get number three going. But it's the ability to have some continuity is really important. 

Mike Crispin 02:19:23 
And if people are learning new tools and technologies, it's good that they have the core understanding of the platforms you have, that's their role, so to speak. And then there's also just surrounding yourself with good vendors, and having good peers and partners, you know, if you get into a jam that you can rely on. 

Mike Crispin 02:19:40 
So I think that that's really an important piece of it is maybe outside of scope of your initial team, but that you have a good network that you have a good set of vendors within your organization. And you've got good documentation around the systems that you do have that are a runbook that someone can take and run with, you know, as time moves forward. 

Mike Crispin 02:20:00 
Yeah. 

Kevin Dushney 02:20:01 
And just to add, I know Joel's going to go, but actually Joel's earlier point about, you know, understanding who does what on your team that becomes more difficult as you get bigger. So, you know, figuring out a way how to communicate that to the business so you sort of set it up for success. 

Kevin Dushney 02:20:19 
And they're seeking out the right person or to minimum the person they get if you have is completely the wrong person on your team. They have the, you know, the business acumen to say, you know what, I don't know the answer to that, but I know who does and direct you to the right person. 

Kevin Dushney 02:20:37 
And, but you can define like I hate mentioning the name of the product but we have a certain web based platform thingy that it and begins with an S and you can see like who does. I mean, we have a little fun with it too it's like who are the players on the team here's what they do and here's a fun fact or two and it's just, it's a little bit of like I can go visit the page and learn about the team, 

Kevin Dushney 02:21:07 
and that could be on any. 

Nate McBride 02:21:09 
Are you afraid to shit point? I'm sorry, SharePoint. 

Kevin Dushney 02:21:15 
It was not a box, so yes. 

Joel Nichols 02:21:17 
You said Baltimore earlier. I thought that you were going to say that was Slytherin. Slytherin, the name of that one? 

Nate McBride 02:21:23 
Haha 

Kevin Dushney 02:21:24 
Joel you know like the delivery mechanism need but the point is like people 

Nate McBride 02:21:33 
We have the platform for a moment the approach is the approach I think is excellent and and Joel like bring us home here on this question 

Joel Nichols 02:21:43 
Yeah, I mean, you know, I've been fortunate enough to be hiring some people lately. And the way I interview, to give my expectation, I borrow a quote from the CEO from the the Voldemort company. He is, he is an excellent leader. 

Joel Nichols 02:22:01 
He really is, despite how we feel about that company at times. He told his entire leadership team, he says, I don't want know it all's but I want learn it all's. And, you know, yeah, it is a good quote, because it's he said, don't come in acting like you know the answer. 

Joel Nichols 02:22:19 
And it's fine if you don't, when we ask a question in the round table, just say, not sure, but I will get it back to you. And I expect that for my team. It's like, there's so much changing all the time. 

Joel Nichols 02:22:32 
Our science is changing all the time. Of course, you don't know it all. But you can figure it out. You can figure it out by asking someone who's smarter than you. They're everywhere. We work with so many PhDs of everything in this world. 

Joel Nichols 02:22:45 
It's fantastic. I love going to work where I am surrounded by people who I am fundamentally convinced are smarter than I am. Because I have a I have a chance to learn or bring them in a room, whatever I have to do to get the right information, the right context, the right level of understanding. 

Joel Nichols 02:23:02 
And that's how you keep learning the whole time because it's just it's, it's changing. I started with small molecules. By the time I started to figure out chemical engineering, I was in biologics, started to understand monoclonal antibodies. 

Joel Nichols 02:23:14 
And then I was in proteomics. Now suddenly, I'm in gene editing. I'm like, I give up. What am I trying to do? I can't, but I can't give up. And that's the point you have to kind of keep learning it. 

Kevin Dushney 02:23:24 
It's funny you say that because like, one of the things I always find fascinating is like the science at the company you work at. Like I worked at El Nylum, RNAi was nascent, gene N -A, I worked at EditTOS, now, you know, targeted protein degradation. 

Kevin Dushney 02:23:40 
I find the science fascinating and I'll take every opportunity to strike up a conversation with a scientist. Like, can you explain this to me and how does this work and here's what I've learned, but can you go one level deeper? 

Kevin Dushney 02:23:53 
And they love to tell the story. So it's just building more a better bond between you as a leader and the group and, you know, it just, I don't know, it's a bit of a pay it forward, but also it's an intellectual curiosity of like a, you know, that lifelong learner mindset. 

Kevin Dushney 02:24:11 
And you can't always find that. I love to have all lifelong learners on my team, but just not everyone's wired that way, you know? 

Joel Nichols 02:24:21 
But people I'm hiring for tomorrow are, they have to agree. 

Kevin Dushney 02:24:24 
I think you should try to optimize for that the best you can. I think that strategy is spot on. It's just people are people and not everyone. 

Nate McBride 02:24:32 
because before we finish we're gonna go back to the original question I asked which was would the same journey be possible today that you all went through to get to this moment would you be able to join a help desk today be an infrastructure lead today work in a college today and end up as an IT leader in the same way that we all did is it possible and you can answer this any way you want any one of you can just start with our journey for our journeys be possible again 

Speaker 6 02:25:16 
I personally don't think. 

Mike Crispin 02:25:18 
I think it's, I think it's possible. It's just less likely, much less likely. 

Joel Nichols 02:25:26 
Yeah. And I, I, there's a lot that could go into it, but I think it's like a lot of things. It's where you are, where technology is and the scarcity, you know, that gives you more opportunities because there are less people that know it. 

Joel Nichols 02:25:38 
You know, Nate, when I was thinking about your journey, it was, hey, were you an expert on those things? Nope. But you were the one who knew it better than others around. 

Speaker 6 02:25:47 
Yeah. Thank you very much. 

Joel Nichols 02:25:47 
Right? And it's just, there's less of that now because a lot more people know technology. We have these digital natives that are coming out everywhere. 

Nate McBride 02:26:01 
If we're all going to change our help desk, if we're all going to in the next three to five years, fundamentally change how we think about service, if we're all going to think about differently about how we implement platforms and use AI for decision making, then there's, I would argue, there's no chance for our journeys to be recreated the way that they happened. 

Nate McBride 02:26:28 
Now they might happen a different way, but we've eliminated some of the possibilities that other people could go through to get to where we are. So there's a new journey that's being developed and we don't necessarily have our fingers on it yet, although you all talked about it. 

Nate McBride 02:26:45 
You mentioned various parts of this new journey people have to take, but to become an IT leader, say to be a head of IT 10 years from now, they will go on a much different journey. 

Mike Crispin 02:27:04 
We are hiring people who have the ability to learn and grow as our sort of core groups and teams into our organizations. They may not be a token service desk person, but they may be coming in as a very junior role. 

Mike Crispin 02:27:17 
I do think there's an opportunity for those people to grow and be leaders, but not, I'm just saying like, or even in the data respect, you have someone who's a lower level data analyst and is growing up through the organization. 

Mike Crispin 02:27:31 
There's opportunity for someone to be a, perhaps a chief data officer, digital officer down the line. But I think it all depends on some of the automation and technology evolves as well. But I think it's maybe specifically to the role that we're talking about and where we came from specifically, it will be way more difficult if not impossible. 

Mike Crispin 02:27:55 
But it sounds like, based on some of what we've discussed, I think a lot of IT leaders today are gonna hire people in the organization, maybe a junior who are able to learn and grow and they learn the business, they learn that they come in at a very, perhaps young age or right out of school, they may have the opportunity to grow and to be that leader. 

Nate McBride 02:28:13 
but on the same journey that we took, Mike, or a journey that's similar. 

Mike Crispin 02:28:22 
Yeah, not exactly the same. Sure, yeah. But someone who comes to the organization is a, you know, is a very passionate prompt engineer, you know, or that has a great front wheel and the ability to work with with different people and under grows to learn the business in their early 20s and grows up the organization builds a great network. 

Mike Crispin 02:28:48 
You know, I think the opportunity is is there to come from something that's very specifically focused in one technical area and grow to be a leader. I think that's that's a possibility. Again, specifically help desk service desk no but come in in a very focused discipline area and learning the skills to grow is one of the exciting things. 

Nate McBride 02:29:10 
we have to come back to that because with the elimination of a help desk model or the evolution of a help desk model, then how will someone come into IT? Don't answer that because we will next week, but that's a big, that's a big, important question. 

Nate McBride 02:29:26 
How will someone learn how to help someone who's a 30 year veteran who doesn't need their shit, who like wants just the answer? How will someone today help that person out? Joel and Kevin, how would the same journey be possible? 

Nate McBride 02:29:49 
Would it be possible today? 

Kevin Dushney 02:29:52 
I think the outcome could still happen, but I think the journey is very different. I just don't think the same journey is possible for some of the reasons we've been discussing. Like digital natives, access to technology, it's not a black box anymore where you had a bit of an advantage or a significant advantage, you know, 15 years ago versus now. 

Kevin Dushney 02:30:16 
So I think it could still happen. I think it's just a different way to get there. But I have to think on exactly what that different path would be. I just don't think it's the same as like the journey that any of us have taken. 

Nate McBride 02:30:33 
Well, the good news is we're going to answer that question next week. So you'll have a week to think about it. Excellent. Joel, what about you? 

Joel Nichols 02:30:41 
Yep. Yeah. So you're going to get the Joel Stradamus kind of forecast here. So it's not the first time, just the first time on this podcast. No, there you go. Perfect. So I, I believe we're moving, cause what's happening with technology and what we keep seeing in the, the, both simplification and complications, we're getting data, the prevalence of data. 

Joel Nichols 02:31:10 
And they turned me speak on this. I just, I heart more and more on data cause I find data is actually all we're focused on. Cause it's actually the underlying piece of everything we're doing. And it's the greatest complication today. 

Joel Nichols 02:31:21 
Everything we talk about, what we're doing with tech, it's the data, cybersecurity is about data. So I don't know what the world's going to look like in 25 years, but someone coming in today, you know, that, I have a feeling that it's going to have even more of a hyper focus because we have more and more data and it's more and more disorganized and it's more and more difficult to really get your arms around. 

Joel Nichols 02:31:45 
And so hard to know exactly what role they would land in today that would make them best suited for that. Is it informatics? Is it, I mean, there's a number of things I could think of. 

Kevin Dushney 02:31:59 
Yeah. 

Nate McBride 02:31:59 
Well, well, no, no. 

Kevin Dushney 02:32:01 
prompt engineer is a six -figure job so like yeah 

Speaker 6 02:32:05 
Thanks for watching! 

Kevin Dushney 02:32:06 
You know, it says that type of person or, you know, a data scientist with prompt engineer, you know, expertise, and maybe you get yourself in the lead chair because of that. That's your path. 

Speaker 6 02:32:19 
Right. 

Kevin Dushney 02:32:20 
because you now offer a tremendous amount of value and a skill set that people are desperate to have in their company. So something to think about for next. 

Nate McBride 02:32:30 
Well, you'll both be happy to know that next week, we'll be talking about the elimination of your roles as a CEO. Um, because the question will be, as we evolve these people, these, uh, if people that know these new things, the way we've changed how we build employees, the way we think about the next generation of service, um, we have to also ask the question about what is the utility of a CIO? 

Nate McBride 02:32:56 
And we're going to get to this. Um, next week, that was an awesome discussion and I love all the context. You're all on record now for saying all the things you said, because we're going to use this ammo against you next week, or at least I am, um, more importantly, thank you because I, and my, my sincere hope is that as you listened to each other and you talked about this, you begin to think about. 

Nate McBride 02:33:24 
Well, shit, it is going to change. It wasn't the way I came up because I think about that. Like no one's ever going to do what I did to get to where I am. And that's like every industry ever. That's every single guy who ever did anything or, or, or a woman who rose to the ranks, they're like, well, no one's ever going to go through what I went through to get to this point. 

Nate McBride 02:33:48 
True. But the IT department, which we defined earlier is changing too. At the same time. So we have two different sorts of dynamics happening. The IT department is changing. The roles are changing and, and, um, we're going to be in this shit. 

Nate McBride 02:34:08 
Like we're not exempt from it. It's going to affect us on this podcast. Like we are not, it was like 15 years from now, maybe when we retire, whatever we're done, we'll look back at the very recent history and say, well, we were part of that, but we're not young enough or old enough to miss it. 

Nate McBride 02:34:25 
It's going to hit us. So we're going to, we're going to visit next week. We're going to talk about decentralization versus matrix IT. Okay. That's one topic we're talking about the, uh, the organization model in general. 

Nate McBride 02:34:42 
What does it look like in the next decade? We're going to talk about the evolving IT leadership role. Is it actually the CIO? What about the CDO or the CISO? Where did, where are they coming into this model? 

Nate McBride 02:34:58 
And lastly, talk about sort of innovative ideas for where the department can transform and that will include assessing our IT capabilities and like planning for the future, developing a transformation roadmap, scary, but are we going to do it? 

Nate McBride 02:35:16 
Cultivating a culture of innovation and adaptability, but more importantly, empowering employees to do more than we can do. And then lastly, where are we going to invest our money in talent, skills, development, and how much money should we invest and how much time should we invest because we know they're going to leave us? 

Nate McBride 02:35:35 
So the question will be, which we will answer next week. What will the leader of tomorrow look like and how would we develop that person? How do we even know how to identify that person to develop them? 

Nate McBride 02:35:49 
So that was fucking awesome. I love you guys. Thanks so much for doing this. I want to remind everybody that, uh, if you like our show, again, give us all the stars on all the platforms. Number one, don't be a dick, especially don't be a dick people in IT. 

Nate McBride 02:36:10 
We're working our asses off to accommodate your every need. Please, uh, even if you're having a bad day, just understand that like we might not be having our best day either. So let's like have a beer together or coffee. 

Nate McBride 02:36:22 
Don't be a dick to IT. Don't be a dick to anybody. Everyone's going to get to work in the morning. No need. No need to like cut lanes. We'll all get there at the same time. Cause you got there five minutes earlier. 

Nate McBride 02:36:33 
It doesn't make you better. Uh, be cool. It will get paid back in spades. Be nice to animals. Be nice to old people. Have your pets spayed or neutered. Uh, and, and leave a dollar tip at Dunkin Donuts. 

Nate McBride 02:36:54 
It doesn't just drop a dollar in like go through your change before you get out of your car and go into the store, find some coins. They take every tip. Also donate to work your media. Did anybody else have any closing comments before we shut down? 

Mike Crispin 02:37:10 
No, thanks everyone for joining. This was great discussion and sounds good. 

Joel Nichols 02:37:14 
Hey, you know, I guess any vendors out there, you know, get me your t -shirt quick before next week. I mean, that's 

Nate McBride 02:37:22 
Yeah control all the shirts. He has no problem. He's got his little studio there. Simply bought all the banners. He'll do not wear a Viva show next week. Okay. Box. Narrow against it beer or 

Joel Nichols 02:37:39 
That would be good. Yeah, we'll find something. 

Nate McBride 02:37:42 
All right. Again, thanks to you all. I'm sorry to keep you late tonight, but that was awesome. Thanks so much for joining and we'll see you all next week. You bet. Take care guys. 

Speaker 5 02:37:52 
Bye, guys, give us five stars because we are awesome adopt an opposing we need frozen twinkies and johnny walker gold drinkies the calculus of it