Calculus of IT - Episode 34 - 10/2/2024 - "The Next-Gen IT Paradigm - Part 2"

Kevin Dushney and Joel Nichols joined Mike and me again to discuss whether or not the IT Paradigm should be changed and how we might do that if we wanted to.  We discussed:

1. Evolving IT Leadership Roles
   • The changing role of the CIO - why do we still need a traditional CIO and where is this role going?
     1. Chief Digital Officer (CDO) - is this even/was it ever a thing that could sustain itself?
     2. Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) - will any CISO want to move into this role?
     3. None of the above/something else entirely
2. Innovative Ideas for IT Department Transformation
   • IT as an true internal consultant beyond the typical MSP model - been there done that but it could really really work well if there was some additional components not yet tried
   • Citizen development and low-code/no-code platforms and how much IT could theoretically be pushed back into the enterprise - this really dovetails wonderfully into decentralized IT - your leader is a policy maker/security wonk and everyone else is responsible for IT in the company (e.g., turning shadow IT into company-wide IT)
3. So how are we going to do all of this?
   • Assessing current IT capabilities and then plotting a delta between now and then - imagination probably wont be too far from reality
   • Developing a transformation roadmap beyond simply going digital because in doing so you will become digital by default (you have to) and you can go on to what is next beyond that - we cant keep having a digital transformation plan every single fucking year - eventually we have to go to the next thing.

Bottom line - what will the leader of tomorrow look like, be called, be expected to do?  What will IT be called?  What will IT do?

It was an awesome episode and though we left a lot of questions unanswered, we did cover some significant ground.  Key points:

1 - To run IT requires the evolved ability to handle a significant amount of complexity all at once.
2 - Relationship building is at the heart of everything.
3 - You have to know what's going on everywhere, all of the time.
4 - You have to be able to constantly gauge time and emplace buffers before things even happen.
5 - You need an enterprise view of the data no matter what.
6 - The types of people we hire will dictate the strategy whether we want them to or not.
7 - Employee Experience management will be instrumental to success of any strategy.

Transcript

Kevin Dushney 00:02 
We've already devolved into talking about AI. 

Nate McBride 00:05 
I want to drink Whirlock once a year, or twice a year. So if I could just sit out during the show, that's why it's because I had too many Whirlocks. 

Joel Nichols 00:17 
Yeah, we're up. Yeah, Mike's going to do a tick tock campaign for us, and we're going to create avatars and AI that are actually our fan club. I'm very excited for this. Yeah, people are going to talk on tick tock about how amazing you're going to see one right now that Kevin guys just knows everything you know so 

Kevin Dushney 00:35 
This is the proven winner. I love this one. Kevin Stengel. 

Mike Crispin 00:39 
Let's find out next week. Can't wait to see that window. Write anything you want to Kevin. Ooh, Manhattans tonight. Thank you. 

Kevin Dushney 00:49 
Yes, sir, proper still this evening, yeah. 

Mike Crispin 00:52 
You got to be kidding me. That looks 

Nate McBride 00:54 
good man beautiful beautiful mike mike is apparently having no boos october oh really is that a thing 

Speaker 5 01:02 
I don't know. It is actually. 

Mike Crispin 01:05 
This is dish water from the upstairs. 

Nate McBride 01:09 
Mike, what happened to you? You used to be such a good drinker. 

Mike Crispin 01:11 
I'm still a good drinker. 

Nate McBride 01:14 
And Joel, water. 

Joel Nichols 01:19 
No. How can we save fresh hot beer? Oh, nice. All right. 

Kevin Dushney 01:24 
Yeah, you were mentioning them last time. Yeah. 

Joel Nichols 01:27 
I still got some. It's still amazing. So, you know. 

Nate McBride 01:30 
Yeah. All right. So everybody but Mike, that's fine. That's our, that's our anchor. 

Kevin Dushney 01:34 
That's our continuity from the last show to this one, is that beer. 

Joel Nichols 01:39 
That's the one and I and I was given you miss. I was wearing a Viva shirt earlier and just like I should probably change that so 

Nate McBride 01:46 
Yeah, you made a good decision. Let me start my timer here. Hold on. 

Speaker 5 01:56 
you 

Kevin Dushney 02:00 
Is it an AI timer and how long we're going to talk about it? 

Mike Crispin 02:06 
Ding, ding, AI time is over. 

Nate McBride 02:10 
Okay, we're not recording. Well, we've been recording for a while, so suck it. Oh, great. 

Kevin Dushney 02:16 
Okay. 

Speaker 5 02:17 
Thank you. 

Kevin Dushney 02:18 
Anyone go to the the ventiline conference, by the way, speaking of AI. 

Nate McBride 02:22 
I meant to go both days and I went neither. 

Joel Nichols 02:25 
I was on a panel there. Okay. Wait, what? Yeah. 

Nate McBride 02:31 
How'd it go panel man. 

Joel Nichols 02:33 
I mean, you know, I love listening to myself. I find myself riveting. 

Kevin Dushney 02:39 
Have they done anything to that product with the pieces they already have, except for continue to go vertically? 

Speaker 5 02:45 
Well. 

Kevin Dushney 02:46 
mile wide at an inch deep. I'm like, where, you keep telling me you're going to add chemistry capabilities for like the last four years. And I did. 

Joel Nichols 02:54 
that they bought it from a company. So now you have to license it separately, the chemistry module. 

Kevin Dushney 03:01 
the PIP in the AI, originally they pitched it to us as, oh, it'll review notebook entries and make approvals for you if you allow it. And they walked that back to, it'll now summarize the notebook entries to make sure it complies with your policy. 

Kevin Dushney 03:19 
So I'm like, that sounds more reasonable. 

Nate McBride 03:22 
Well, it's unfortunate that they have done some damage to some of the products that were actually really good. Yeah. I won't name any and they continue to buy companies and then not do anything with them. 

Nate McBride 03:36 
Yes. 

Kevin Dushney 03:40 
But the amount of money they spent, I was in there, two of my team members where they said it was like a, you know, salesforce .com convention, like the amount of money they spend, you know, everyone gets their little squid, right? 

Kevin Dushney 03:54 
And then it's like, where do you spend some of this on the product instead of the marketing? I mean, 

Joel Nichols 04:00 
Again, compared to the Viva conference, it was nothing so. 

Kevin Dushney 04:05 
I mean, that's fair. Those have gotten out of control. 

Nate McBride 04:09 
Oh man, what a week it's been. It's only whatever day it is. And just reading the news that's been coming in regarding industry news. I keep shaking my head because now there's two more of all the models. 

Nate McBride 04:25 
We now have the ability to, to, um, graphic reduction and reading with open AI for, oh, um, and J and Google released into two new versions of Gemini all within like the same week. Everyone's just basically doing the same shit. 

Nate McBride 04:46 
Now, like one person does one thing and the next day, then another company does that same thing, but one a little bit more. 

Joel Nichols 04:53 
Yeah. 

Nate McBride 04:54 
But, um, 

Joel Nichols 04:56 
It's like AMD and Intel, right? 

Nate McBride 04:59 
Yeah. Well, speaking of AMD versus Intel, so, um, I, I don't know how many different trade trade online magazines you read, but the national CIO review, it's just an actual, I know. I've never heard of that. 

Nate McBride 05:21 
It's, uh, listen to these numbers. Okay. I'm just gonna throw these out there. Um, Gartner predicts that there'll be 43 million units and a unit is an AI PC, an ARM based AI PC sold in 2024. With IDC expecting the number to rise to 57 million units. 

Nate McBride 05:52 
I guess a unit is a laptop, but this is an ARM based AI laptop. Yeah. 

Kevin Dushney 06:02 
like if you go to CDW and look at like the, I don't know P14 or whatever the current generation is, AI ready is now in the description. I'm like bye. 

Speaker 5 06:13 
It's fucking meaningless. Exactly. 

Joel Nichols 06:16 
Even when Apple came out with the new iPhone and then Google came out the next day, I was like, I don't understand how you put AI on the phone. 

Nate McBride 06:28 
Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, there's some other numbers here. Let me go. So, uh, so IDC says there'll be 258 million AI PCs shipped by 2028. I mean, this is just like a random numbers. 

Kevin Dushney 06:51 
You go to the cloud for you to work. Like, is that what we're talking about? 

Nate McBride 06:56 
be using PCs in 2028. So just stop. 

Mike Crispin 07:00 
Arm is incredibly far behind from a development perspective as well. So in terms of if you have anti you have like like EDR or any tools that touch the kernel anything along those lines don't work at all on Windows Arms. 

Mike Crispin 07:14 
Like Box Drive doesn't work. Sentinel One and CrowdStrike don't work. That really does impact. Who's buying Arm? 

Nate McBride 07:23 
PC's for the corporations, but I I don't know. Yeah, Mike with art 

Joel Nichols 07:28 
At Micro Center, how many of you guys are still selling? 

Mike Crispin 07:30 
We don't have to get micro center gets everything about six years. I mean six months after Chromebooks this week we get Chromebooks 

Nate McBride 07:43 
Gardner expects AI PCs to account for 43% of all PC shipments in 2025. Are you fucking kidding me? That's nearly half of every PC sold in the world will be an ARM based PC. No. No. 

Kevin Dushney 08:01 
But that's not going to happen. 

Nate McBride 08:02 
It gets better. Yeah. Short -term hurdles such as software incompatibilities. Mike. The high cost. I should go in for Gardner. 

Joel Nichols 08:16 
I was going to say, that's why they're all retired CIOs, because that's not an inconvenience for them. Thanks, dude. Work term hurdle. 

Kevin Dushney 08:25 
He was right in front of the... 

Nate McBride 08:26 
Yeah. Such as software incompatibilities on ARM -based laptops and the high cost of NPU integration may slow widespread adoption. Watch out. May. It might. May. So there's the how we save ourselves from being wrong statement. 

Nate McBride 08:44 
May. Hold on if possible. Let me close it up. Drum roll here from this article. With built -in AI hardware though, AI PCs can transform tasks like real -time language translation and content creation while reducing reliance on cloud -based AI. 

Nate McBride 09:02 
Because, now this is my own editorialization, because cloud -based AI sucks. I fucking hate how fast OpenAI responds to me. I clod when I type a response and I hit enter and it comes right back. 

Kevin Dushney 09:20 
It's like, immediate. 

Nate McBride 09:23 
Here's how the article finishes, however, concerns about privacy costs and unproven use cases persists. So you could eliminate 99% of the article, have the opening line and the closing line done. Anyway, that's what we have. 

Mike Crispin 09:42 
talking about is Intel doing an NPU on their their x86 or arm64 machines? I think they are and that's that might fall into the category. 

Nate McBride 09:53 
There was an article, Mike, we read like episode, I don't know, 22 or something like that about the fact that Intel was thinking about it. 

Kevin Dushney 10:03 
Yeah, yeah. 

Nate McBride 10:07 
So anyway, also in the news was the slack Disney thing. Oh, yeah. So in July, Disney, and they're blaming on slack, but Disney had a massive issue with their IT security. And of course, looking for a scapegoat they blame slack. 

Nate McBride 10:33 
They lost 1 .1 terabytes, which is actually like my fucking email store. I've been to locations by heck no bulge. Okay, so no one cares. No one cares. No one cares. But then here's the thing. Disney says, well, we're going to move something more secure than slack. 

Nate McBride 10:54 
We're dropping slack or more secure solution. So I pull my I pull my illustrious speakers. What's more secure than slack. 

Mike Crispin 11:04 
Matter most. Does a quarter. Solar. 

Nate McBride 11:11 
SolarWinds. Two, one vote for SolarWinds. 

Kevin Dushney 11:16 
I mean, I'm just going to say teams that troll you, so. 

Nate McBride 11:20 
Bastard no one said balls under the 

Kevin Dushney 11:24 
Microsoft Trust Umbrella for what's done to stock it up. 

Nate McBride 11:28 
Corporate WhatsApp, oh, wait, there isn't one. No one said smoke signals, writing it in blood, having somebody on a horse carry it. Carry your pigeon? Yeah, you beat me to it. Carry your pigeon. Disney's moving to carry your pigeon. 

Nate McBride 11:46 
We've solved the crime. That whole null ball check, by the way, they were just like, hey, look at all this crazy security holes in Disney. Let's go ahead and go into one. And then they got into Slack. 

Speaker 5 12:05 
Thank you. 

Mike Crispin 12:06 
Sony have a similar situation, but it was just the email server. Did they get rid of email? 

Speaker 5 12:10 
Yeah. 

Mike Crispin 12:12 
Hmm should just go to email move to a more secure email. Oh send mail 

Nate McBride 12:22 
They moved to deck, ultra, photon, male, corporate, right? Uh, you Dora. Um, yeah. So once again, big corporation blaming and slack's not the little guy, but, uh, Benioff had a nice, I don't have the clip here, but Benioff had a nice retort to that or response at a dream force. 

Nate McBride 12:46 
He's like, fine. We're gonna have to do security. That's the, uh, consolidated version of his response that if you can't do security Disney, then yeah, go ahead. Move to wherever you want. 

Mike Crispin 12:58 
Um, I'm not sure they dropped slack for security reasons. There's probably some other, some other internal backroom reason. 

Nate McBride 13:08 
and drop the key code or something, right? Yeah, they're like, oh, yeah, we dropped Google workspace because it's not secure or whatever. No, no, no, it's because the CFO is getting a boondoggle or somebody's getting something. 

Nate McBride 13:22 
That's why they drop these things. Yeah. 

Speaker 6 13:26 
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 the virtual times sunshine 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 5 14:36 
Thanks for watching! 

Nate McBride 14:58 
By the way, we're here at the Calculus of ID podcast. It's episode 34. Do we have any actual topics? Yeah, we do. We have a small topic tonight. We'll get to it in a minute. But it's kind of amazing. 

Nate McBride 15:11 
We got to episode 34. I mean, who would have thought... Holy crap. 34? 34. Who would have thought we started this little podcast about the life and crimes of Phil Collins. Oh yeah. That we had so much to talk about that would have lasted 34 episodes and counting. 

Mike Crispin 15:31 
And yeah, we just liked what AI the whole. 

Nate McBride 15:32 
time for the most part right I know. I mean, we didn't really do Phil justice, I suppose, but I remember like the episode on the studio. That was like a four and a half hour long episode on that song. 

Nate McBride 15:45 
I mean, We totally die. 

Mike Crispin 15:47 
of that, 100%. Every verse, our progressions, everything. 

Nate McBride 15:53 
Yeah. Su Studio. I mean, it really comes down to, did he do it or not? We don't, we're not talking about it tonight. We have other things to talk about, but let's do that. Did he kill his best friend or not? 

Nate McBride 16:03 
And sing a song about it. You think that was Su Studio. Well, it's a studio studio was an apology to girlfriend to the guy he killed. The day before he had the show where he sang in the air tonight. Yes, that's all went all in together. 

Nate McBride 16:29 
But 

Mike Crispin 16:30 
That's why we're here in Poppy 

Nate McBride 16:33 
People are here to hear about the calculus of it. So tonight our very special guests are back with us. The CIO for chimera, Kevin Dushny, the CIO for tessera, Joel Nichols, also Mike Crispin, CIO for Cardurian, I need your pride, your chief digital janitor for gazillion therapeutics, among other things. 

Nate McBride 16:55 
And as always, besides being a IAF, the home of the sad salad, we are basically the only reliable sources of information on the internet. Everything else is shit. You can find all of our episodes on your favorite podcast platform. 

Nate McBride 17:11 
Just search for the calculus of it. You can also find them at the C O I T dot us, which is our website. The T H E C O I T dot us. We have made some changes and now I'm running on top of sub stack, which is nice and everything centralized and people are subscribing and it's cool. 

Nate McBride 17:34 
But you can also find our discord channel links and the episode information as well as the website, and you can come join us on discord. Tell us that we suck or talking more about the episodes, preferably the latter, and then we can have really deep conversations. 

Nate McBride 17:54 
Maybe you can even be a guest on the show and show everybody how much you know about. Um, AI. Um, I also want to mention that if you like our show, or even if you don't like our show, it doesn't matter. 

Nate McBride 18:08 
Please give us five stars and on all the things or wherever you, wherever you listen to the show, it doesn't matter. Just give us the five stars. We'll take them. And in our show description, we also have links to buy our stuff as well as buy us a beer, and if you don't want to buy us a beer, donate to become media. 

Joel Nichols 18:25 
Yeah, at what point can we have, you know, for for a guest? Can you bring an AI avatar as a guest? That would be a great show. 

Mike Crispin 18:35 
Done. I'm drawing up right now. 

Nate McBride 18:38 
Mike, you're on now. Okay, Mike, invite your AI guest to the show. So last week, we got some good feedback on this, actually. We do open to part one of a two -part series on changing the IT paradigm. 

Nate McBride 18:52 
So tonight, we're going to get into part two of this two -part series. And after tonight, we will have hopefully finished answering whether we should and how we can influence the direction in which IT, as it is historically known, is going. 

Nate McBride 19:10 
So last week, we started off the show by having everyone provide context as to how they got to where they are today in terms of a career journey. So we discussed this in sort of an overall context, but now I want to ask the direct question to start off the night. 

Nate McBride 19:28 
And we'll go around the horn, which is with the same journey that you took once before, be possible today. And if not, why specifically not? So for instance, if you were coming out of high school or college or your first thing, and you were starting this journey the same way you started before, would the entire journey be possible? 

Nate McBride 19:53 
And again, if not, why specifically not? 

Mike Crispin 19:59 
So, there's some, some, maybe not just from a right into a management role but certainly from people, you know, that are that are working for a great mentor you're working you come into an organization to help desk person and they go to the next person and they refer you to someone and you grow in a role and you grow in a role and you grow in a role. 

Mike Crispin 20:19 
You know, do you have the opportunity to be ahead of it or maybe even you move into the business and become the head of it. I don't think it's entirely out of the question I think it's way more difficult now that how much technology is embedded in organizations but I do think the power of the network is still strong, not that I mean thinking over 10 years time, you know, for 12 years time who knows where we'll be, 

Mike Crispin 20:43 
but I do think that someone could come to the organization at a lower level, and maybe not directly move to the head of it but may move to a technologist role in the business and ping pong into a leadership role. 

Mike Crispin 20:57 
I think it's possible. It's unlikely but I think it's possible definitely to, to grow through achievement and connection still just a question will you end up being the CIO or will you end up being a sort of knowledge expert or you know technical lead or a domain expert or something like that. 

Kevin Dushney 21:20 
Yeah, I think that, I think that gets to the why, right? Is when we started our careers, it's, you know, you're the, you're the IT guy, whereas now you're, you know, business integrator, capability builder, whether you have a seat at the table or not, you're, you're viewed very differently. 

Kevin Dushney 21:36 
So to walk in the door with no experience today, I, you know, I think that's next to impossible. Either that, or you have a boss in no time, right? And they realize that you don't have enough experience, especially of the, you know, if the company is, you know, early clinical, even clinical, you know, and you have to start a serious capability build. 

Kevin Dushney 22:00 
Having no experience there, you're at a huge disadvantage. Whereas, you know, 25. 

Mike Crispin 22:05 
domain experience, right? Kevin, you mean like domain experience? Yeah, domain experience. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, definitely. 

Kevin Dushney 22:10 
I definitely agree. So, you know, that's what I think. I think IT is, and for the good, it's become very important to organizations and it's seen as an enabler versus before. It was like almost a necessity, you know, maintain the servers, fix the laptops, and, you know, you were called to the table and they needed something from you, but now it's, you're so much more integrated in the business. 

Kevin Dushney 22:33 
I just, I think it's prohibitive to getting in the door without that experience. 

Nate McBride 22:40 
I want to just quickly follow up on that point, which is very, very true. There's a, again, thinking back to even 20 years, the responsibility and thing that you wanted to hear from IT was, is it working? 

Nate McBride 22:53 
Is everything up? Is everything good? And when we need you, we'll call you. Versus today, where it's your, you have to be in front of everything. There's a huge demand on your ability to understand all the pieces that are in play, how they work. 

Nate McBride 23:11 
It's no longer a sit back and I'll wait for the call. 

Mike Crispin 23:15 
Yeah, it's gonna be proactive. Yeah, it's and it's it takes a lot to still run it even now. I mean, there's a lot of Complexity and effort and there's more complex 

Kevin Dushney 23:25 
You know, think about shadow IT or the swipe of a credit card, and you've got a new platform on your network, you know, and that's that just wasn't true. You know, 20 years ago, you can hold everything. 

Kevin Dushney 23:37 
So, when that's not that it's about control is just, you know, you need to build those relationships and say, okay, what's going to get that that group to come to me to partner on a solution versus you know what. 

Kevin Dushney 23:51 
I don't have any confidence in these guys, especially a newbie that doesn't doesn't know my area I know it better than him or her so I'm just going to go do it myself. 

Speaker 5 24:00 
Right. 

Joel Nichols 24:02 
Yeah, I think, I think in the past, you know, depth, technical depth was, you wanted to have at least some level of technical depth, one area, another, you know, I, I'm an infra tech depth, I'm a, you know, SAP tech depth. 

Joel Nichols 24:17 
Now the breadth is so far, you don't need it. And it's, it's kind of like, you know, Kevin, you were saying, but all of you were alluding to, you have to know exactly what's going on in the business all the time, it's constantly changing because now the technology is everywhere. 

Joel Nichols 24:33 
It's the data is everywhere. It's permeated, it's used, people are running with it and we don't want to slow them down, but at the same time, enabling it in a controlled way where it's architected to it has a future vision. 

Joel Nichols 24:48 
It's, it's difficult. It's hard to get your feet under you sometimes to do it. 

Nate McBride 24:54 
I mean, just think about resumes 20 years ago, you had to list all the all the technologies you knew because they were relevant 

Kevin Dushney 25:02 
Or your certifications, right? Am I supposed to delete all? 

Joel Nichols 25:05 
that now, my HTML, I was supposed to delete that from my languages, Java, and you know. 

Nate McBride 25:10 
Keep it. Keep it. Keep the CSS on there. 

Kevin Dushney 25:14 
It's tight. Yeah, I mean, it at least gives someone a laugh, right, when they look at them. 

Nate McBride 25:20 
That would be funny, actually, just to include like HTML too. Um, full concept. So, I mean, it's true. Like we had to show, no, don't care. Say if you're, if you're basically coming to YT, it doesn't really, I'm not saying it doesn't matter. 

Nate McBride 25:36 
I mean, you could be coming in for a very specific role. You have to know sort of reactive, you know, something like whatever. But in the grand scheme of things, if I come in to a company, it's about what I've done and what I know on a broader scale. 

Nate McBride 25:56 
Like how, and even articulating that in a resume is very difficult. Okay. My last company, I did all these transformation projects. I'm not listing that I know how to write a script in Airtable anymore. 

Nate McBride 26:07 
Cause that doesn't matter. The expectation is that if I can't, I'll find someone that will. 

Kevin Dushney 26:12 
You know, in answering the so what question, right? I never do this and like, and what did it result in? 

Mike Crispin 26:19 
Yeah. What was the up? 

Nate McBride 26:21 
right, right. So that's, I think that's one of the biggest changes in the last, you know, near term, is we used to have to be able to show and prove that we knew a technology, and it morphed into well, we now have to show and prove how we understand how technology works with other technologies, we have to show the bigger picture. 

Nate McBride 26:41 
It's not so much. And that's a huge delta. And so to get that knowledge, right? Like the number, the number ones I've had working for me recently, in the last few years, they're coming in very, very good at a certain area. 

Kevin Dushney 26:58 
Don't you mean number two? 

Nate McBride 27:02 
that's also a big debate. Is it number one or number two? I don't know. I mean, Picard calls 

Kevin Dushney 27:08 
According to Dr. Evil, it's number two, but. 

Nate McBride 27:11 
Yes. The card calls Riker the number one. 

Speaker 7 27:15 
Right. 

Nate McBride 27:16 
and so that's a fair point so let's say number one and a half quality you there 

Kevin Dushney 27:25 
One point five. You have the come. 

Nate McBride 27:29 
come here it's um it's like okay so how am I gonna give the direction to this person well here's you need to know not only this but these four other things and they're all key giant principles and be good at all of them and then it doesn't really matter operationally speaking like which one you're the best at unless you're gonna go that if you're gonna go that way you're gonna become cyber security then know all these other areas but be better at cyber security and the rest but if you're gonna become a IT leader you have to be able to speak I think all the language yeah you don't have to write script you should know what script does I mean 

Joel Nichols 28:10 
For good examples, we haven't spoken about this upcoming technology called AI. I thought it'd be a good time to bring it up. 

Kevin Dushney 28:17 
We've never touched that one. 

Joel Nichols 28:19 
Right, I mean, yeah, all kidding aside, it's, it's permeated everything anyone wants to talk to at work. And so you're, you're responsible for not understanding, you know, explaining how transformer tech came out in 2017 and what it means to tokenize, you know, nobody cares about that. 

Joel Nichols 28:39 
That's interesting for us, because we still have, you know, slightly geekish side. But the reality is, is they want to know, what does it mean for them? How are we going to make sure we're not left behind? 

Joel Nichols 28:51 
What does that look like? And it's, on one hand, you need to know enough depth of the tech and the limitations, so you can keep people from going crazy. And at the same time, you don't want to stop people from, because you don't want to be left behind. 

Joel Nichols 29:06 
I mean, it's, you know, we can, we can laugh and joke and kind of should do some extent, but it is, it is enabling, it is doing incredible things. It's just in the right cases. 

Mike Crispin 29:17 
Great, absolutely. 

Speaker 5 29:21 
So. 

Nate McBride 29:21 
Let me ask you this question, which is, I mean, you mentioned AI, but would you consider, this is probably a poor comparator, but would you consider like an API environment, a middleware environment with the very idea of middleware to be as important as AI? 

Nate McBride 29:42 
Um, here we compare 

Kevin Dushney 29:44 
impact of middleware? I think now, yeah. And I would say that because I think, you know, AI is just so overhyped at the moment that, you know, integrations in middleware are still very, very relevant, right? 

Kevin Dushney 29:59 
Integrating different systems, or bringing in data into a landing zone, doing something and presenting it is, there's a lot of practical use cases that drive business value. Whereas AI, you know, at least my company, we're still struggling on, like, where's the value proposition, right? 

Kevin Dushney 30:19 
It's not clear, especially early research. You know, we talked about this last time. Later in commercial, I think, if you're mining analytics using AI, and you have the appropriate model, that could be powerful. 

Kevin Dushney 30:30 
But I don't know, there's a lot of what ifs, and let's see what comes on AI versus middleware is very tangible, and still very relevant right now. 

Nate McBride 30:41 
But if I put them head -to -head, I would say that middleware is still just as important today as it was, right, the mule sauce and the boomies and all these other, you know, when it was like the sort of like the capture the zeitgeist of like the 1819 market, but it's still just as important, but it's not talked about anymore, you're just expected to, well, connect this to this. 

Nate McBride 31:02 
Yeah. It's not as sexy. 

Mike Crispin 31:04 
tell me how you do the engine of most businesses right i mean that's the the informaticas and the boomies and they're the they're running major transactional processing within companies it's the backbone of a lot of technology organizations i think we bought our condo last 

Kevin Dushney 31:20 
year. And, you know, my enterprise apps guy has been busy building so many integrations and workflows with all of our systems from financial to research and like that's a big part of his job. 

Nate McBride 31:34 
So then Kevin, how important is it for you? Let's say that, let's say that you're not in the role you're in. You're like one notch down and you're looking for, you're looking to get into the role you're in. 

Nate McBride 31:46 
How important is it for you to know the inner workings of Workato versus the concept of middleware? 

Kevin Dushney 31:54 
Yeah the concept. I think you just have to know what tool would be used to solve the problem and that's probably your level of knowledge and then you know who to call on to get it whether it's a consultant or somebody on your team but yeah I don't think you need to be conversant. 

Kevin Dushney 32:08 
That's the thing is now you need you know back sort of the benchling analogy you can be you need to be a mile wide but you don't have to be super deep on any particular thing but 

Mike Crispin 32:20 
What's it cost to support? What's the total cost? What's the marketplace? What can you get skills to support it? Like that's probably what you need to know most. 

Joel Nichols 32:30 
And what do you, and what do you need from the business? I mean, that's still it. And that's your data management and data governance. You can, you can use them to where all you want without some level of that. 

Joel Nichols 32:38 
It's not going to be effective. 

Kevin Dushney 32:40 
Not gonna work. Yeah. What are the requirements? What are you trying to do? What business problem are we solving? You know, all good things to ground on before you embark on anything, whether it's middleware or a project. 

Kevin Dushney 32:50 
But yeah, that's a good point. 

Nate McBride 32:52 
So Joel, I'll ask you this question, based on what Kevin said, if the idea is to understand the context and how it fits into the overall program more so than the function of the technology itself, which you can now source the operational part to somebody else, how do you get to that point? 

Nate McBride 33:08 
What's the step before that moment? How do you understand how middleware fits into the overall context? 

Joel Nichols 33:15 
Yeah, it's the other fun part of the job, which is to somehow know what's going on in every function and what is happening. Kevin talked about the importance of having a seat at the table, and it's what's exhausting about the job at times. 

Joel Nichols 33:32 
You kind of have to know what's going on and what they're doing. When you find out late, you have to have the conversation of, I'm impaired at my ability to do my job to serve you. Yeah, and then there's a reason why. 

Joel Nichols 33:47 
And it's often not with ill intent at all. It's usually just, we didn't think this mattered to you. And it's like, well, the weird thing is it all matters. The more I know what we're thinking about doing or doing, you know, a great example, maybe to answer your question, they just like, we're having questions right now, long range planning. 

Joel Nichols 34:06 
I'm not gonna divulge any secrets by saying, you know, if you're an R &D company, you dream of getting to the clinic and eventually commercialization, shocking. Now, as we're building our IT strategy, and I'm working with my team on this and what it's gonna look like for five years, I'm not really hardening to any date because things are gonna change. 

Joel Nichols 34:27 
I am, I'm basically doing the opposite of a predecessor. I'm saying, so when you think we're gonna be at a large clinical trial, at that point, I'm gonna need nine months prior to implement a solution for quality control. 

Joel Nichols 34:41 
And it's having that working knowledge of what's happening in the changes, which allow us to make sure that we don't put something in too quickly, but also don't get there too late. 

Kevin Dushney 34:54 
Yeah. Yeah, it's a good point. I mean, we're going through similar exercise and at clinical stage, I push back on, you know, somebody asked for a five year roadmap, like, I can't give you that. I'll give you two years. 

Kevin Dushney 35:09 
One year is going to be pretty, very precise. Two second year, pretty good. But years three and out, like, who knows? Depends, there's so many dependencies and lack of input that I'd purely be guessing. 

Kevin Dushney 35:23 
Right. I can tell you based on my experience, if we succeed and hit all these, you know, milestones that you've put in your MRP or LRP, then this is what it would look like. But it's just a straw man until you get through those gates. 

Kevin Dushney 35:38 
And that's a that's a hard concept to swallow. I've found for people is like, well, I want to a roadmap for five years, like we're a biotech, you just really can't, 

Joel Nichols 35:48 
do that. I would like one too. That's usually my response. 

Kevin Dushney 35:52 
Exactly. Give me all the business inputs, right? And like, where are we at that time? Are we US only? Are we XUS? How many trials are we running? What stage are they at? How big is the company? You don't know the answers to any of those questions, so I can't roadmap it. 

Kevin Dushney 36:10 
We can all guess and hypothesize, and that's fine. But as long as you treat it as a strawman until you can pave that out further once you understand what your working assumptions are with some kind of level of accuracy. 

Kevin Dushney 36:27 
So... Sorry, that was your question, Nate, but... No, no, it's Jeff. 

Nate McBride 36:32 
So I'll ask one more question before we get into the big topic tonight that this question is so so in theory I think we could all see potentially the same journey happening, but obviously with a lot of changes, but We're all leaders of IT right now today and We saw that we talked about this last week and we just covered it a little bit more tonight That yeah, it's it's not going to be the same journey for anybody else Especially because you don't need to know every tactical detail, 

Nate McBride 37:05 
but you need to have You need to have a broad understanding of all this technology and how it's how it interplays with the company 

Speaker 5 37:13 
Yeah. 

Nate McBride 37:14 
So with that in mind, the question I would ask is, are you, am I the only person in IT who can do this? And before you answer it, let me caveat that by saying your jobs aren't on the line here, but in truth, if we're all talking about the fact that we all went through a journey once, and today the same journey wouldn't necessarily be possible, though there's a small likelihood it could happen again in a similar way, 

Nate McBride 37:49 
but most likely it'd be different because we wouldn't be so focused on understanding technology, we'd be more focused on understanding how technology fit with other technology. With all that in mind, is there potential for someone who's not ahead of IT to be making these same decisions, or is it going to require a head of IT to do that? 

Kevin Dushney 38:19 
Um, I still think you need a head of IT because of some of the reasons we just went over, right? You need the broad, yeah, knowledge and also the business. Like that's, that's one thing I, in my early journey at my very first biotech was understanding the business of biotechnology and knowing what the groups do. 

Kevin Dushney 38:40 
And that was a huge advantage for me in starting my career there. It paid forward big time. But I still think you need a head. I think I'll, to back to your other question, if you're number two and want to be the head or number one and want to be the head, you need a good mentor, right? 

Kevin Dushney 38:59 
You need to learn those skills and ask a lot of questions. Like, because now, like, you know, I don't know, I'm sure you guys are too, but you're presenting to the board, mainly on cyber, not really asking about your strategy and roadmap, but cyber for sure. 

Kevin Dushney 39:14 
But yeah, you need to have those, those skills to be able to present. Um, you know, you can practice that, but I think you need a strong mentor to learn a lot of that stuff from or guide you. Like here's, if you want to be ahead of it, here's my roadmap for you. 

Kevin Dushney 39:30 
And it's not just, you know, getting technical stuff. It's like, get out there and learn the business, talk to people, you know, understand what they do. And, you know, that puts you in a position at some point to, you know, go to a smaller biotech and, you know, be the head. 

Kevin Dushney 39:45 
You have enough critical mass of knowledge to be proficient. And there's always going to be a little bit of on the job learning anyway, but you ride that line of, okay, I can, I can grow with the company and they're not going to be compelled to hire a boss over me in two years because like, I don't have the chops to do it. 

Nate McBride 40:04 
All right. Well, Mike and Joel, before you answer, Kevin asked one more follow up question, which is, where did you learn to speak to the board? 

Kevin Dushney 40:12 
Um, I think it's mostly practice with speaking to the executive team, you know, from, from early, well, every company I've been at, I've had in some form to present, you know, here's my budget, here's my plan. 

Kevin Dushney 40:27 
Um, it was looked very different back in 2000 than it did now, but, you know, building slides, telling a story, um, being concise, like, you know, that you have to learn all those skills, I think, to be proficient and just think of it as if I'm presenting to an executive team, you know, avoiding a ton of acronyms, techno speak immediately, you're not seen as a leader, you're seen as a technologist, 

Kevin Dushney 40:52 
right? That's a hard par-, you know, paradigm to shift out of it once you're in that, in that box. 

Nate McBride 40:59 
So Mike, with that, with what Kevin just said, let me ask you this question. Like when do you begin teaching your number one and a half how to speak to the board? 

Mike Crispin 41:12 
I think it's a question of that person wants to speak to the board, you have an opportunity to do that right out of the gate as part of their individual development plan, whatever they're looking to do. 

Mike Crispin 41:22 
But ultimately, their role is to speak to the board, you give them exposure at maybe a lower level, all company meetings to present, yeah, start to build some overall presentations to a smaller group, let them present get feedback, develop the personal, the personal and public speaking. 

Mike Crispin 41:41 
Some people have a great skill right out of the gate, right? They're good at it. But it's putting like Kevin was saying, just put in the business terms, the goals, the results, we're trying to achieve how we're getting there, what the cost is, what the business value is, who we what your support, get your support team and the business around you to help help you at the table. 

Mike Crispin 42:01 
And then when you go to the board, you have all that confidence and back in maybe one or two executives at the table already, if you're trying to propose or ask for money or something on those lines. 

Mike Crispin 42:10 
I mean, for me it was just go out on that. 

Kevin Dushney 42:13 
Like, like I use, you can debate whether I T steer codes or valuable or not, but interestingly, one value that I found in having those meetings is letting people on my team run the meeting. 

Speaker 5 42:28 
Mm -hmm. 

Kevin Dushney 42:28 
and I tee up what we're talking about and then try to step back and let them present. Be like the sponsor type. Exactly, right. And that gives them in a more friendly audience, but there are senior people in the room, including some C -suite, and that's a great training ground, I think, for them to develop those skills of like, look, here's how you need to speak to people at this level. 

Kevin Dushney 42:52 
You know, it needs to be high level, strategic. It can't be a bunch of technical crap that they don't, they're not interested in, or, you know, technical jargon that they don't understand. Yeah. But, you know, and then you can give them feedback. 

Kevin Dushney 43:05 
So I think that's a way to develop, you know, if you have a couple of rising stars in your team, that's a great way to develop them, give them the opportunity, give them the feedback, and then just continuously improve them until, you know, they're ready to, if their desire is to be ahead of IT, then I think that's part of your remit is to teach them your job and, you know, whether it's a place you, 

Kevin Dushney 43:25 
if you want to leave, or they go somewhere else. They want to be ahead. 

Mike Crispin 43:31 
Yeah, I think there's, there's a lot of skills as a question of, you know, just, just talking to the board go on the top five in the first year. I'm not sure. I don't think it's on the lines of present, even presenting depends on the person and where their strengths and weaknesses are. 

Mike Crispin 43:46 
But you're talking about steering committees, Kevin, but also just projects like presenting a project to maybe if you're part of the finance organization or part of the development organization, you usually get four times a year or twice a year, some opportunity to give the IT presentation, if you will, or to do lunch and learns and other things, and really test the waters and get excited about that. 

Mike Crispin 44:09 
And then there's somebody who would love to learn and, and also just personally have a hard time with just presenting in general, just because it's nerve wracking. And I was certainly like that at the beginning. 

Kevin Dushney 44:21 
I tell people that, look, when I first started my career, I couldn't get up in front of the company and talk. And now it's like, whatever, easy, you know, but that took a lot of practice and a lot of work because, you know, if you're more introverted and, you know, learn to be extroverted and enjoy that stuff, it's a journey to get there. 

Kevin Dushney 44:41 
But, you know, sometimes just telling people, like, look, I didn't start my career being able to present like this. I've failed many times along the way, so will you. But you'll get there. Just, you know, keep out of it. 

Kevin Dushney 44:54 
If that's your desire, you know, I don't force them to do this, but I give the opportunities, you know. 

Nate McBride 45:03 
I want to ask Joel a question, which is would you force somebody who you did, who you felt would be a good future leader, would you force them to do this? 

Joel Nichols 45:12 
Um, in the right setting, I would put them out of their comfort zone a little bit. Um, I mentor a young man who's, I think incredibly talented and he, he, you know, told me how nervous he is speaking in front of groups and, um, we got him connected with an improv training group, um, work because I think learning to think on your feet helps you tremendously in these types of things. 

Joel Nichols 45:38 
I did a little bit of improv and a lot of theater, and I find that that's a really useful skill set, um, because looking for and finding the right words where you don't say when the board asks you, so do we have a weakness here? 

Joel Nichols 45:55 
And in the back of your mind, you're like, golly, you defunded me twice. This whole thing's coming down and the words instead that come out are, well, we've mitigated well within our means in such a way that we believe with a little additional funding, we're going to be able to put this together. 

Joel Nichols 46:10 
You know, there's, there's, uh, that's, that's something that takes practice and failing in an improv club is a great way to, uh, to practice that. 

Kevin Dushney 46:20 
It's a subtle way of saying you're squeezing me, so I'm doing my best. 

Joel Nichols 46:24 
I mean, just getting very real, when you're talking to the board, you don't want to say too direct, but you also don't want to miss the opportunity where everything's green and rosy and then suddenly you have a breach. 

Nate McBride 46:40 
Well, so Joel, I mean, I'll cut this out. I want to hear a brief acting part. I promise I'll cut it out. 

Joel Nichols 46:47 
Trust you at all 

Nate McBride 46:49 
Why don't your best like, seriously, I promise I'll cut it out. Um, I want your best like Rosencrantz or, um, like, give me, go ahead. Give us all like a little. 

Joel Nichols 47:03 
I mean, sadly, most of my practice lately was when the kids were young and I was good at doing like, you know, character voices like, you know, I can do it, I can do it goofy or Mickey Mouse, if you like, but yeah. 

Nate McBride 47:15 
Yeah, both, both. 

Joel Nichols 47:17 
Yeah, so all right say let's see goofy. Oh gosh. I present to the board is a really hard thing 

Kevin Dushney 47:27 
Oh, oh, you really think so, Goofy? I mean, I don't think it's that bad at all. 

Joel Nichols 47:38 
That was Mike Crispin. That was fantastic. I really liked your Goofy. Kevin, your Mickey was awesome. 

Nate McBride 47:51 
All right. Okay. Okay. Well, thank you guys. Um, that was good. Sort of we're setting the tone here because this one's going to be a little bit uncomfortable. 

Joel Nichols 48:00 
Hey, can I, can I add one more to your question? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. If you, if you, you know, do you need the kind of coming to the, do you need a head of it or can someone else do it? I think all of us have come into companies where they had a director level IT person or a senior manager reporting to take your pick CFO, whatever other function and what you have as someone who's trying to do their best at a leadership level, 

Joel Nichols 48:30 
who sees what's happening in the business, but as they depict it to a person who's a little more narrower focused and probably more technical, the technical person is creating tech debt upon tech debt, because they're hearing go do this, don't spend this. 

Joel Nichols 48:45 
And you end up with the mess. And usually we come in and say, why is this not connected together? And where was the foresight? And it's easy to get upset at the poor senior manager director, but they thought they were getting the right guidance. 

Joel Nichols 48:59 
The way it was coming down to them was not with the right questions and asking the questions to make sure you understand all of the business context. 

Nate McBride 49:09 
I understand that, but the bigger question is, and we're going to answer this in a moment, is if there wasn't a head of IT, it would probably make a decision that was mostly accurate. We do need XYZ system. 

Nate McBride 49:22 
We do need a, a, a, um, system to run financials. Okay. We do need an ERP. We do need an HR system and we don't need IT to tell us. It'd be nice to have IT to tell us. But what does IT know about HRIS or, or, or CRM or ERP? 

Nate McBride 49:42 
I mean, do they, does that person really know? We know because we were forced to know in the future, is it just as important that the head of HR knows everything there is to know about HRIS platforms as the head of IT? 

Nate McBride 49:59 
Who is the person who should be the expert on that thing? And this is a rhetorical question, but let me frame this the perspective of. Yeah. So there's a director of IT at a company. They have 30 people. 

Nate McBride 50:11 
They're waiting on their second round of funding. And this director of IT, they're just solving help desk shit. And they're like buying stuff every now and then they, they make a decision like, yeah, you shouldn't do that. 

Nate McBride 50:22 
Or you should do this. Right. They're not really in charge. What they're doing is they're playing a role, the playing role to answer questions, uh, to the best that they can. But what we'll, what we'll get to in a minute is the difference between the person who's answering questions and solving problems, which we'll call the IT technologist versus the person who's driving technology strategy. 

Nate McBride 50:51 
And is that person actually the head of IT? And while it may seem like an obvious answer, a lot of what we've already said makes it maybe not so obvious anymore because especially as we go forward and we're thinking about technology, well, if my head of research, if my CSO comes forward and says, we want to implement AI for molecule assessment, what am I going to do? 

Nate McBride 51:20 
Am I just that IT operationalist now saying, it sounds like a good idea. Like let's do it. I'll, I'll help you do it. Or am I the one who's supposed to say, no, no, no, no, no. Let me predict the future and plot your course. 

Nate McBride 51:33 
So it's a, it's what we're going to get into just in a moment. I want to set, so I, I, everyone's feedback is going to be key because now what we get into is this question. So tonight, like I said, we're going to get a little controversial, but with good intent. 

Nate McBride 51:49 
First, uh, many, many episodes ago, Mike and I discussed IT department models. Okay. We discussed decentralized IT versus matrix IT. And we also covered a bunch of other models too, but those are sort of like the two big ones, everyone's familiar with those and for good reason, they have sort of the best risk benefit ratio. 

Nate McBride 52:09 
Um, the topic focused on whether or not we should have a traditional IT department anymore and, and what else was conceivably possible. So that discussion sets a stage for tonight, along with everything else we've talked about. 

Nate McBride 52:25 
So that's where I want to start, um, decentralization versus matrix IT and the pros and cons of each model. So I realized again, there's many potential models, but I want to talk about these two in general. 

Nate McBride 52:38 
So let's dive into that. So first of all, and Mike, you and I talked about this, so jump on in, but decentralized IT, okay. The idea that there is a person who is the IT defacto leader, but really they don't have, they don't have like a construction department. 

Nate McBride 52:57 
There's people placed all over the place in the company who are responsible for various IT functions, you know, there's an ERP lead, they're in finance and there's a HR lead, they're in HR. This IT person is really focused on, um, bringing it all together somehow. 

Nate McBride 53:14 
There's a matrix model, like what we all do right now, it's me. I have a number one is number two, there's number four. There's not all these people and they work in sort of like a pyramid structure and life is sort of harmonious. 

Nate McBride 53:27 
However, we all are relying on each other to get something done. Like I can't do this without these two other people in my department doing this for me, like I'm waiting on them to do it. So my customer can't get the thing they want done until this whole other sequence of events has occurred within my department. 

Nate McBride 53:50 
So let's look at these two models specifically, and we'll open up the mic. Decentralized versus matrixed IT, pros and cons of each. I won't start because I've already talked about this ad nauseam, but whoever wants to start on this. 

Nate McBride 54:09 
Because this sets, by the way, this sets the stage for the real big discussion coming after this one. 

Kevin Dushney 54:17 
Um, I think in either model, you still need, you know, the facilitator or coordinator, whatever you want to call it, uh, the, the overall architecture. Right. It's completely decentralized without someone to coordinate all of this. 

Kevin Dushney 54:32 
I mean, I can only imagine the mess if everyone just chooses their own platform and then, you know, like who's, who's around to integrate all of this and who's making that decision. Right. So the HR people might know the most about, you know, HCM, they make a decision. 

Kevin Dushney 54:50 
They buy this, somebody else, you know, a different ERP, you know, talk to each other. I think that's one key. 

Nate McBride 54:58 
risk. But hold on. Let me pause you right there, Kevin. So let's suppose that that was the case. What's the mess you're talking about? 

Kevin Dushney 55:08 
you end up with a list of information that you haven't. So what it's all. 

Speaker 5 55:14 
Thank you. 

Kevin Dushney 55:15 
So what? I mean, I think back to our middleware comment, the integration of data across platforms is proven to have a lot of value. And if everyone's left to their own devices to buy their own system, that may not happen organically. 

Kevin Dushney 55:32 
I think you need someone evaluating like, okay, you can choose this system. But here's pros and cons. And if finance chooses this ERP, and you want these two to talk to each other someday, you know, this, this is going to be a huge lift versus if you choose this and this. 

Kevin Dushney 55:50 
So but who's you know, who's if you don't have that, who's providing that input? 

Joel Nichols 55:53 
If your finance department decides, hey, we can have cost centers be flat, we don't have to have any real hierarchy there or just one level of hierarchy. And meanwhile, HR says, well, for departments, they're all going to be a strong hierarchy. 

Joel Nichols 56:06 
It's going to be a one -to -one instead of one -to -many. So do your cardinality rules come in? How are you going to reconcile that when you're trying to give things like authority to spend and elements like that? 

Joel Nichols 56:19 
And that's why a system may have a primary group that knows the most about it, and it really should be the main stakeholder, HR for HRIS. But the people who are dependent upon the data flow to and from it extend far beyond that function. 

Kevin Dushney 56:39 
Maybe think about it through this lens too. Who's taking the enterprise view? 

Nate McBride 56:45 
Okay. Well, who sets the enterprise view though? 

Kevin Dushney 56:48 
I'm not saying who sets it, but if everyone's just thinking about their own department, who's thinking about the enterprise as a whole? If it's totally decentralized, you have no head of IT, I think that's your working assumption, right? 

Kevin Dushney 57:00 
Yeah, and your question is, who does that? Who has that enterprise view? Who's the architect? 

Nate McBride 57:07 
Well, but let me ask the question, like, let's back up one step and I'm just going to play devil's advocate, but why does you need to be an architect? At what stage do we say an architect will make this better than it is right now? 

Nate McBride 57:19 
And honestly, think about this for a second. I'm not trying to be like totally provocative. But if I say like, okay, all the functions have their own platforms, they're all running great within their platforms. 

Nate McBride 57:32 
What's the moment where I say, wow, these should be integrated. And, and with good reason. 

Mike Crispin 57:41 
I think if you want to automate your business, you probably need to integrate your systems today. And more and more, as you need to prove compliance or data integrity across your systems, you need a way to do that. 

Mike Crispin 57:53 
You need someone to help facilitate and partner and help to make clear that there's requirements. 

Nate McBride 58:04 
or specific you said if you want to beat beat don't be if you want to tell me why you want to why do you why do I want to integrate my systems 

Mike Crispin 58:16 
To make sure your data is good would be one reason, I think, between systems. You would want to automate to improve and reduce human error, improve performance and reduce human error, potentially. I'm saying potentially because some companies, they may not have the need to automate and they've got enough people and they don't want to change that. 

Mike Crispin 58:38 
Automation can scare people, too, because there's an overhead to it and it's... Do I need a CIO for this? You need an enterprise. I think we're on the previous broadcast. I think you need an... If you don't have a CIO, you need some sort of an enterprise view, like an enterprise architect. 

Mike Crispin 58:55 
Exactly. Someone who's probably got some GRC or cyber security related. That's doing the enterprise view that's looking across the groups, especially to stay compliant, in some respects. 

Joel Nichols 59:07 
If you've got a shelf of books, this doesn't need to be organized, not really. You move to an entire room full of books, there's probably some level of organization, especially if multiple people are gonna start using it. 

Joel Nichols 59:19 
If you are running a library, there's a reason the Dewey Decimal System exists because you need to have a system to organize the data in a way that is useful for a collective group to find what they need, to retrieve what they need, to return what they need, to keep it secure. 

Joel Nichols 59:35 
That's where processes and systems come in. Does it have to be the CIO role? Well, I mean, in the end, you're talking about somebody who has an enterprise view and it's focused primarily around data, making sure that the data is accessible, making sure that the data is secure. 

Mike Crispin 59:51 
It could very well be like a lack of a better term, like a chief automation person or, you know, someone, somebody who's really focused on bringing the business to the 2 .0 operationally, bringing the, it could be, may not be a chief information officer, but it can be something very similar to that. 

Mike Crispin 01:00:08 
That's that's focused on operational excellence that's focused on automation, speed and compliance. Yeah, I just think you have a. 

Kevin Dushney 01:00:17 
app and the business if you don't have a role that performs a lot of those core functions. I just don't see how you can be as effective if you have, you know, some leader that is orchestrating the technology vision for the company. 

Kevin Dushney 01:00:33 
Even if you fast forward to commercial, which is a clear case for integration for even compliance reasons, you know, master data management, sunshine laws, concur, like there's just a lot of the considerations that an individual and the individual group in the business may not be thinking about. 

Kevin Dushney 01:00:52 
It's all on legal. 

Nate McBride 01:00:56 
We, the only people in the business that can know this, like what would prevent a commercial lead from knowing the same thing that we know? No, they could. 

Kevin Dushney 01:01:06 
But are they thinking about the enterprise or just the commercial group? I don't know. I was just using that as an example, but I think it's the same problem. You're, you know, you're, you're, you're, you're what you care about most is your own group, not the entire company. 

Joel Nichols 01:01:22 
There's also the assignment of being unbiased. I'm really good with the budget. I know a lot of the financial functions. Could I run finance? I mean, that's a different question, but there's a reason the finance function exists. 

Joel Nichols 01:01:36 
And that is because it's unbiased. It's gonna make sure that everyone has their actuals and their budget and they're held accountable to an extent. And they hold that across everyone with a centralized IT function, at least at one level, I'm not biased toward, boy, I wanna put, I wanna make all my master data flow into my purchasing system because I like that. 

Joel Nichols 01:02:00 
We strictly wanna do what makes the most sense for the pure enterprise because we don't have an individual function that we do with IT, but generally it's not juxtapositioned in a way that the other functions are. 

Nate McBride 01:02:18 
So I mean, it's a good example using finance, right? So when it's time for budget re forecasting, does the finance team do it for you? Or do you do it yourself? 

Kevin Dushney 01:02:32 
Yeah, it's it's a combination. They ask for inputs and they facilitate. 

Nate McBride 01:02:37 
But but you have to fill it out, right? Like they're not saying they're going to do it for you. 

Mike Crispin 01:02:42 
But they build a model a lot of the time where they work. 

Kevin Dushney 01:02:45 
I mean, in my case, they build the model, they sit with you, and what's changed since the last time they did the model, and that's part of the re -forecast. 

Joel Nichols 01:02:52 
and staying on that analogy similarly like I'm not going to implement an HRIS by myself because you're right I might know a bit about it and I might be able to help but absolutely my requirements what my HR unit how they want to operate and what their processes are matters most 

Nate McBride 01:03:08 
So what's your role in HRIS then, Joel? 

Joel Nichols 01:03:12 
It's to facilitate here's how you capture the requirements in a way that we can put this together the same way that finance is giving me the here's how we capture the budget so we can put it in. It's the checkpoints because I know how to drive projects so we can make sure we're headed in the right direction. 

Joel Nichols 01:03:25 
It's using good hygiene around testing and making sure that it worked the way we intended. 

Nate McBride 01:03:32 
So just to finish the thought, your role is less somebody who was the person who learned all these operational functions about it and technology and learned all these ways to present to teams and learned all these wonderful ways to do middleware instead, your role is really to facilitate the best path forward for an idea to make sure that it has the fewest roadblocks and that it works best with everything else you have. 

Nate McBride 01:04:04 
I mean is that in a nutshell? 

Joel Nichols 01:04:08 
Very well said. 

Nate McBride 01:04:11 
Okay. 

Kevin Dushney 01:04:11 
Yeah, I think that captures it well. 

Nate McBride 01:04:14 
So, so let's get into this then, because we're going to solve this problem, even if we don't all agree. So when we think about decentralized versus matrix IT, and I think that based on what we just said, matrix IT appears to have a sort of a clear win, but decentralized could potentially work, that person needs to be really focused on the enterprise as a whole, which basically becomes almost a pseudo matrix IT model anyway. 

Nate McBride 01:04:48 
Think about the next decade. So between the four of us, we have over 100 years of IT experience, which is a crazy number. In four years, that will be 140 plus years of experience in IT. Well, 40 years combined, 10 years each, in those 10 years, if we're all still working, what will our roles look like? 

Nate McBride 01:05:17 
What will our departments look like? And that's what I want to answer. I want to focus on the following topics as we answer this, because this is the most important thing in thinking about how we do IT leadership and sort of building next generation IT paradigm. 

Nate McBride 01:05:32 
We can't just simply assume, I think, that the way we're doing it right now, this matrix IT model that we're doing, is the best model today, number one. Number two, because we have nothing else to base it against as a comparison. 

Nate McBride 01:05:47 
But number two, whether or not this will be the same model we should be using two, five, 10 years from now, because of the way technology is changing around us and what people are learning, matriculating classes of college kids coming into the workforce and people leaving the workforce and the workforce changing with upscaling models. 

Nate McBride 01:06:07 
I want to focus on the following topics tonight. Number one, the evolving IT leadership role. So we're all CIOs. I want to talk about the changing role of the CIO. So why do we still need one? If we're looking for somebody who's a joiner of ideas, who is a person who can hear all the things and sort of make something new, is that still a CIO? 

Nate McBride 01:06:31 
Okay. And where is that role going? Could it be the chief digital officer, which has been a role that's been around for maybe six years, but I don't even know if this role ever could sustain itself or will sustain itself. 

Nate McBride 01:06:48 
But the chief digital officer, I think, was born out of this whole zeitgeist of digital transformation that Gartner made up. Yeah. And everyone kind of got caught on it. Secondly, is the CSO role. Could the CSO role ever run the show? 

Nate McBride 01:07:01 
I strongly believe that it could in the right circumstances. Would the CSO even want to take over the role? And then lastly, is it something entirely different? Number two, I want to focus on the idea of innovative ideas for IT departments in terms of transformation. 

Nate McBride 01:07:19 
Number one, under that group, IT is a true internal consultant. Could IT actually be not a department? And would it work better? I've been talking about like this chargeback model that we've tried years and years ago and didn't work, thinking about actually not having IT, but having a person who's an expert and every single other function is outsourced, not an MSP, but an actual IT department. 

Nate McBride 01:07:45 
And then lastly, on that group, on that sort of notion, citizen development, how much can we push back on the users? Like, can we literally push back everything on the users, help desk support, basically on a sort of like a crowdsourced model? 

Nate McBride 01:08:01 
Can we push back, you're responsible for every single thing that you buy in terms of development, and we're only here to merge it all together at a high level? Like, how could we do that? And then lastly, the big question, how would we do any of this? 

Nate McBride 01:08:14 
So how would we assess our current capabilities? Like, how would you measure today and plot a delta between now and 2028? How would you develop a roadmap from here to there? Like, what would you actually write in that? 

Nate McBride 01:08:28 
How would you cultivate a culture of trust for innovation? And then how would you invest in the current team you have? What else? 

Mike Crispin 01:08:38 
What's that? What else do I need to figure out? Sad those eight, nine, ten things? 

Nate McBride 01:08:45 
I want to walk you through this. Don't worry, like my mind is spinning. Yes. Well, we're going to start with the big Kahuna because I want to put the big nacho with cheese first. Yes. The CIO role. Like I talked about this before, I think it's time has come to end. 

Nate McBride 01:09:10 
There's a time for a new role. This person that Joel and Kevin have both described and Mike, you too many times, this expert, this person who can bring all the things together, do they need to be the head of a department? 

Nate McBride 01:09:28 
Could they be just an independent role? Where's the role going? I think this is. 

Mike Crispin 01:09:34 
I think it's certainly like it's still an information office serving data and information are really a big, if not the most important thing whether it's securing the data or having good data integrity or getting great data, eliminating data, adding better data. 

Mike Crispin 01:09:50 
It's the, you know, people say that the new oil I guess right it's the one of the most important. I said that life life bloodier company right. Yeah. And that's it. 

Nate McBride 01:10:01 
But don't get hung up on the CIO part, just get hung up on the 

Mike Crispin 01:10:05 
role. Right. So I think that that's part title or what the person 

Joel Nichols 01:10:11 
We can call it whatever we want. Exactly. 

Nate McBride 01:10:13 
Well, the CIO is kind of like the ACME of the, of the program. But the CIO is a suit, they sit in meetings, you see them time to time, they make decisions. We're all, I know we're not all CIOs, but I call us that because it's what we are. 

Nate McBride 01:10:33 
I mean, we're effectively the person who's the suit. You know, the decision maker, the shot caller for IT. But in truth, that role, our roles, are we best? I mean, in the companies we have today, we're small, but are we best served in the role? 

Nate McBride 01:10:51 
Or would we be better off if it was just independent? If the four of us were independent saying, like, we're making IT strategy. And this other group that they're just executing, they don't report to us. 

Nate McBride 01:11:05 
We're just calling the strategy, calling it a day. 

Mike Crispin 01:11:09 
like a consultant, internal consultant role. Kind of, yeah, kind of. 

Nate McBride 01:11:15 
I think one idea though, the idea of the CSO taking over, I mean, let's just explore this. 

Joel Nichols 01:11:21 
I'll throw an interesting one to continue your provocative idea, which is maybe a really good CIO, as we've been describing it, is actually suited to expand. Why can't they do a COO role at some point in time? 

Joel Nichols 01:11:36 
You're really talking about some processes. 

Kevin Dushney 01:11:38 
No, no, we've talked about this. So the, it's a tough transition because the COO roles I'm seeing out there are people coming out of like a program management and clinical level, right? Especially in our- Exactly. 

Kevin Dushney 01:12:00 
It's more about program management leveled up and they can even, a lot of them often have even commercial experience. So it's just different because I looked at this, we hired a COO at our company and it's a role I've been interested in, but this is a completely different profile person. 

Mike Crispin 01:12:21 
a lot of manufacturing and technical operations too, right? You see that like manufacturing background. And yeah. 

Joel Nichols 01:12:27 
Yeah, but should it be? I mean, don't get me wrong, it's a good question, right, because they have to learn something too. I find some even great COOs have run less projects, have led less program management than we do just by the nature of the sheer magnitude of things that come through the shop. 

Speaker 5 01:12:48 
Mm hmm. 

Mike Crispin 01:12:51 
Great question. 

Nate McBride 01:12:52 
Yeah. I mean the COO role too. We could have a whole show on the COO because. Part three now. The chief operations officer. Well, is IT not part of that? I mean, why does she need to be a COO and a CIO? 

Nate McBride 01:13:11 
They're both focused on making the company efficient and work together in, I hate the word, but synergistically. Yeah. But there's, they work side by side. One does this, one does that, but they're really talking the same language. 

Nate McBride 01:13:29 
You know, that's a great question. And Kevin, you and I have talked about this in the past. I mean, the COO, what is the scope? And I think industry wise, it changes in terms of life sciences. It's certainly pretty much the same wherever you go with some small deviations. 

Nate McBride 01:13:50 
But yeah, that person is responsible for GNA, manufacturing. They're responsible for basically making sure all the groups get their shit done. 

Speaker 5 01:14:00 
Yep. 

Nate McBride 01:14:02 
including IT. So would the COO not want IT because they maybe don't have a technology background and then punt it down to somebody beneath them? Possibly. But would the COO also work just as well with a person at their same level making decisions that require people from their group? 

Nate McBride 01:14:27 
So if the CIO is making big decisions and they need a COO, is there competition there? Like are they looking for the same resources to accomplish alternative goals? It's a big question. I think that, at least in my experience, seeing a CIO and a COO in the same company is rare. 

Nate McBride 01:14:52 
Usually the head of IT is lower than the COO. It either reports into the COO or the COO. You don't often find them at the same level. 

Speaker 5 01:15:06 
Right. 

Nate McBride 01:15:08 
I mean, even if you're a commercial stage life sciences company, and you have either internal manufacturing, or you've got, you know, close CMO, the COO, and the CTO have got that, the CIO is left sort of out here to solve the rest of the problems, they're only brought in as needed. 

Joel Nichols 01:15:31 
which is most of the time. 

Nate McBride 01:15:33 
which is most of the time, but they're not necessarily viewed at the same level. You know, how many times have you seen a CIO be a section 16 officer? 

Kevin Dushney 01:15:43 
I've yet to see one. 

Nate McBride 01:15:45 
same. Yet a COO who one could state has the same level of responsibility. I mean, considering the fact that one breach can kill a company, the CIO is not an officer. 

Speaker 5 01:16:03 
Mm -hmm. Yes, yeah. 

Nate McBride 01:16:06 
The chief marketing officer, chief human resources officer. 

Kevin Dushney 01:16:10 
Yeah, it's really, it may have the C in front of it, but it's that they're not section 16 that oftentimes not in the executive team, depending on the company and, you know, senior person, but you're to your point, you're not where the CEO is or the CFO or the chief legal officer. 

Nate McBride 01:16:35 
Right. So this is going to be uncomfortable. But if the CIO isn't going to get the same at a section 16 level, why does it need to exist if not for a resume or salary? Yeah, everything you don't have to answer that. 

Nate McBride 01:17:02 
But I want that to just hang out there for a moment, because I want to come back to the CSO part. Why is the CSO let off the hook? Or let me rephrase that. Why isn't the CSO considered to lead IT today? 

Mike Crispin 01:17:24 
I think they split paths in some respects. The, I think CISOs need to report more directly into leadership than into a CIO, at least in the future as we go move forward. And it's like quality managing regulatory. 

Mike Crispin 01:17:40 
I think that that says over time this, can they manage IT? I think they have an important role in terms of having to be very risk -driven. And there's a lot, worked a lot of great CISOs, great, but they're focused mostly on risk. 

Mike Crispin 01:17:56 
And if there's any opportunity to kind of take a little more risk and try something new, it's often met with a lot of examination as it should be. But, you know, that's the main focus. So I say like the sort of GRC risk leaders, chief risk officer path for CISOs, and then like a, whether it's a CIO, COO, chief digital officer type path on the CIO site, or, you know, if you're technical, or I think there's a path from CIO, 

Mike Crispin 01:18:28 
and it'll be more common path to CIO to COO to CEO, at companies who become more data -driven pharmaceutical companies, very successful CISOs who've shown they can run the digital operations of a company and have reduced costs and sped up there, given their company a competitive advantage, almost like a chief technology officer, hybrid, they could be a CEO someday. 

Joel Nichols 01:18:57 
You know, something Nathan, you said that it's fascinating, you know, we have often the CEO, the C -suite that's around them, is a set of people who are the why -nots. They're the risk people, your CISO, your head of compliance, your head of quality, you know, even HR to an extent, because the CEO is trying to make executive orders and actions and having someone to explain the why -not. 

Joel Nichols 01:19:21 
The interesting thing about the CIO role, it's although they say that we're often the ones that say no, the expectation is that we say yes and we find a way, and the key is find a way. And so I do think that's a slight differentiation from some of the other seed titles. 

Kevin Dushney 01:19:42 
Hey guys, I apologize, but I need to jump off. 

Speaker 5 01:19:47 
No! 

Joel Nichols 01:19:49 
you 

Nate McBride 01:19:49 
Sorry, it's okay. Um, thanks for coming on. We'll let you have to look for this one, Kevin, but, uh, we're just going to go ahead and speak on your behalf for the rest of the show. 

Kevin Dushney 01:20:01 
Feel free to put an avatar in my place, and I'm sure you can talk about it. 

Nate McBride 01:20:08 
Thanks for coming on. 

Speaker 5 01:20:11 
Bye guys. Bye. Thanks, Kevin. 

Nate McBride 01:20:15 
So, um, well, Joel and Mike, the CISO role. Let's just, I want to just finish this one. I've known a lot of good CISOs and then all I could see so is that report to CIOs, in fact, every CISO I know reports to a CIO, which makes no sense to me. 

Nate McBride 01:20:38 
And I've made this, you know, I've said this multiple times to the CISOs and the CIOs and everyone seems to feel like it's a natural relationship. Do you feel like it's natural relationship? 

Joel Nichols 01:20:52 
There's an element where they can speak the same way, but you can make the same thing with head of quality and head of tech ops in our space. Just because you can speak the same way doesn't mean you don't have, by definition of your roles, contrary viewpoints that you should have. 

Joel Nichols 01:21:12 
And so I find if you're small and growing and your security department is growing, maybe you can keep it under there, but as soon as you have any semblance, I agree. You should split it off from the CIO because you need to have that conflict. 

Joel Nichols 01:21:30 
Where we say go, they need to say whoa. 

Mike Crispin 01:21:36 
And have, and have the ability to, to push back if they're reporting in it's often like, I get it. We understand, you know, and they, or they don't speak up some, some of them are maybe last season ones won't really push hard that like, you're my boss. 

Mike Crispin 01:21:52 
So you're accountable, you know, and they may not really raise the risk at a level that it should be raised. 

Nate McBride 01:22:03 
Yeah, this has always been my concern, which is that, yes, it seems to be a natural fit because security does deal with technology at the same time. I would, I would, I would personally never have a problem. 

Nate McBride 01:22:15 
If I walked into a company and there was a separate security division. I mean, obviously they would be a stakeholder both ways. Um, I would want all their feedback on my initiatives and I'm sure likewise theirs. 

Nate McBride 01:22:27 
But I don't, I still don't understand to this day why security has to report into IT as supposed to be in a partner. 

Mike Crispin 01:22:39 
People think of it as a technology thing still, I think, to some extent, right? It's less of a risk, I mean, at least risk, it's less of a risk thing. And so I still think there's sort of this thought process that it's an IT thing. 

Mike Crispin 01:22:52 
And cybersecurity is a company -wide thing. It's a, it's more of a horizontal than it is a, than it is a, everyone participates, everyone's aware, everyone has responsibilities. Yeah, it's, if we come back. 

Joel Nichols 01:23:06 
back to the Disney breach we were talking about via Slack. I don't have any details, but I would wager a very large sum of money that it was actually an employee who allowed the breach to happen via Slack versus Slack itself being the issue. 

Joel Nichols 01:23:23 
And it's exactly what you're talking about, Mike. It's not, there's a technology component to it, but for a CISO, it's much less technology than it is just. 

Mike Crispin 01:23:39 
No, no awareness and yeah, it's 

Nate McBride 01:23:42 
All right, so. 

Mike Crispin 01:23:43 
And the other thing, just one other benefit, and we're kind of all saying the same thing about splitting it, is I think it also frees up that CIO to some extent to focus on that innovation, to focus on perhaps better governance and automation, and to have that peer and a CISO to really be someone who can, sometimes security people, they will enable that change because it helps them. 

Mike Crispin 01:24:10 
You know, if you have better automation, you have a better data management, the CIO is driving that initiative, a lot of CISOs will say, yes, that's what I want, I want better data documentation, I want better inventory, I wanna be able to see where the data goes, and you're willing to have a project, Mr. 

Mike Crispin 01:24:26 
CIO, to do that, I'm gonna partner with you on that. And as I think it frees up, and CIO, I think CISOs also have an opportunity to be more of a GRC leader in general, to work on not just cybersecurity risk, but overall company risk, and be a strong leader in an enterprise risk, leadership type team, as time goes, and let them focus on that, whether or not CISOs have an IT hat, and they help out on infrastructure things and other stuff sometimes, 

Mike Crispin 01:24:55 
it's like really giving them the space to focus on their leadership role as a risk leader. 

Nate McBride 01:25:02 
So let me just ask one question, which is if there was a capable CISO who came up through the technology stacks, like we all did, and this CISO knew, um, pretty much, you know, how to sort of join technology to get her in a safe way. 

Nate McBride 01:25:18 
Would they not be eligible for a CIO role, but as a CISO, or would they, or should they report to a CIO if they are equipped, if not more equipped than the CIO themselves? 

Mike Crispin 01:25:34 
I think in small companies, there's a great opportunity for SISO to be a head of IT, absolutely. And then even a medium organization as they grow, because they're going to learn those skills, or maybe they were a head of IT before. 

Mike Crispin 01:25:46 
Well, there are a lot of SISO's that have come from a background as an IT leader. So I think there's an opportunity there, but I think as the company grows and as the needs to modernize the business grow, or if you're starting from scratch, having two different roles, if the company can afford it or feels that it's a, it's the time to scale out that part of the operation. 

Mike Crispin 01:26:10 
I think it makes sense to have separate roles as you go forward. But I think it very well be a head of IT for a smaller company to start anyway. 

Nate McBride 01:26:23 
Okay, Joel. 

Joel Nichols 01:26:25 
We have seen people move back and forth between the roles. Once again, I use quality tech ops, kind of the same thing. I think it's healthy. But again, it's just you intentionally have to look at things differently in those. 

Joel Nichols 01:26:43 
So Ed of IT reporting into a CISO, I mean, the most important is person -dependent. The right CISO? Sure. Most of the time CISOs I've worked with were fantastic. They don't have the same enabling mindset as much as they are high degree of process, high degree of rigor, high degree of risk. 

Joel Nichols 01:27:06 
You know, it's great things with an understanding of the technology that's around all of those. And that mindset will be difficult to enable IT to keep the business moving at just the light speed that it keeps expanding with. 

Nate McBride 01:27:27 
Do you think problems could arise though, if we're always making CISOs report to CIOs? 

Joel Nichols 01:27:35 
Yes. Yeah, I'm not a fan. I'm not a fan of that either. Like I said, I would rather have if you have a head of compliance even had a quality and you put your see so over there. I actually think that's a better overall fit. 

Nate McBride 01:27:48 
So you think that having cybersecurity, not an IT, but parallel to IT, at the very least, that's a good model to have. 

Joel Nichols 01:27:59 
In my, in my opinion, just, just because you end up with, like I said, a, um, you want someone who thinks differently than you because of the function, whether it's even, you know, innate function, they should. 

Joel Nichols 01:28:10 
So. 

Nate McBride 01:28:12 
I agree with you, by the way, 100 percent. I don't feel like cybersecurity should be a function with an I .T. It should be a part of that. 

Mike Crispin 01:28:20 
legal stack, right, or under the sort of the 

Nate McBride 01:28:22 
Yeah, legal stack, maybe, or even its own function. But I mean, I think it was Kevin that said this, but yeah, who, who reports to the board? Is it the CIO? The board doesn't want to hear from this CIO. 

Nate McBride 01:28:35 
CIO is like, blah, blah, blah, generative AI, budgets or whatever. They want to hear from this. So. 

Joel Nichols 01:28:42 
They really enjoyed when I was talking about our Palo Alto upgrades. 

Nate McBride 01:28:45 
Yeah, I'm sorry. They're like, Joel, tell us about that upgrade that you did that transformed our clinical trials. 

Joel Nichols 01:28:55 
We ran the config update at two in the morning for minimal impact, it was incredible, it was riveting. 

Nate McBride 01:29:02 
They literally like when did they stop when did they stop clapping was like a half hour later? 

Joel Nichols 01:29:07 
It was, it was. 

Mike Crispin 01:29:09 
Yeah. We got a new firewall this month. I love when they asked, like, some time a few years back, it was like, so what's our firewall? I was like, ask that at one point. It's like, oh, interesting. 

Nate McBride 01:29:22 
Did you read that, Orbs? Is that where you got the word firewall from? 

Mike Crispin 01:29:27 
I do sometimes think like sometimes you may be in those board meetings and they'll ask you a technical question and you're like, I'm not answering that, it's like you gotta be like, take a step back and be like, yeah, you know, we can table that. 

Mike Crispin 01:29:39 
I'm happy to get you some information on that. But it's like, when you could answer the question, but you know, you don't want to go to that rabbit hole, right? You're just like, nope, you're trying to, you're trying to learn me here. 

Mike Crispin 01:29:48 
I know what you're trying to do. 

Nate McBride 01:29:51 
So I'm like, IOS versus Android, like, what do you think? Let me get back to you on that one with some data. Are they jail breaks? Yeah. 

Speaker 5 01:30:03 
Mike, you have that vision. 

Mike Crispin 01:30:04 
Should we get those? All right. 

Joel Nichols 01:30:10 
Well, you were wearing that, right, Mike? That was your board presentation. 

Mike Crispin 01:30:13 
I walked in this bumped into the table and 

Speaker 5 01:30:19 
Battery fell out of my pocket. 

Nate McBride 01:30:21 
Like from New Orleans, there was a bald guy with glasses on a VR pro making like grunting sounds. I mean, should we get those for our whole company? 

Mike Crispin 01:30:34 
I'm just swearing on a 10 zoom call. Okay. Well, 

Nate McBride 01:30:41 
Well, all right. So like that particular question, I think it's an ageless question. I mean, it should always be examined. Like ultimately, you know, we've talked about, like, you know, that I have a passion project to eliminate the CIO role, but replace it with an experienced lead. 

Nate McBride 01:31:03 
Somebody who's, um, and we've talked about sort of like what CIOs do and what heads of ITs do, but I think that there's a lot of that shit that can be sort of cascaded down to some really, really sharp direct reports and the CIO or this head of human experience, as we'll call it, can be focused on how does everything work to make employees better? 

Nate McBride 01:31:26 
And this is not HR because in this model, the HR department would be eliminated too. We would just have this one person whose sole focus was on every single day when you walked in was your experience amazing. 

Nate McBride 01:31:42 
When you open up your laptop and you logged in, amazing. You printed amazing, but you Slack somebody just fricking amazing, right? All of it amazing. The technology piece, I feel like is so minutely operational. 

Nate McBride 01:31:59 
I mean, yes, we have to make ERP work with HRIS and that's just table stakes now. That's not complicated anymore. It used to be complicated these days. It's like, um, do you want to allow Oracle to see your debt? 

Nate McBride 01:32:16 
Do you want to read the terms of service? Scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. Yes. 

Mike Crispin 01:32:21 
Done. I do think master data management's a challenge for companies. I mean, that in general is... 

Joel Nichols 01:32:28 
No, we, every place I've been has nailed it. I mean, we can start. 

Mike Crispin 01:32:32 
right? 

Speaker 5 01:32:32 
Yeah, it's ubiquitous. 

Joel Nichols 01:32:35 
Thank you. 

Nate McBride 01:32:36 
That's why I have a whole consultancy just focused on unstructured data management because everyone's nailed it. Um, but that's our role too. Like, uh, Joel, you, you weren't there. And actually we didn't know each other back then, but when Mike and I were at TKT, we actually had a digital librarian worked at the company and her role was exactly this know where every fricking thing was and then get you the thing you needed. 

Nate McBride 01:33:01 
And she ran the whole thing and it was a brilliant, such a fun role. I wish I could do that role, but that doesn't really show up anymore. I don't remember the last time I actually saw a librarian in a company, but there's this idea that yeah. 

Joel Nichols 01:33:18 
So, say, you know, while we're disrupting, what if we disrupted all of the C -suite roles to an extent? And you kind of put it into a modern workplace. And I think you're kind of hitting the nail on the head, which is experience, that's one. 

Joel Nichols 01:33:33 
Data, because data is where everything is. I'm gonna go with delivery. Delivery is an important piece, right? Sounds a little bit like operations, but I'm gonna go with delivery. And then compliance. 

Joel Nichols 01:33:47 
You know, you've just, almost those four verticals, well, there's a lot of roles which are very similar. They give some wiggle room to reshape things. 

Nate McBride 01:34:02 
Welcome to the calculus of it episode 35 eliminating the C suite tonight. I have Joel Nichols and Mike Christian with us. And we're going to eliminate the whole fucking C suite replaced with actual experts in various areas of operational 

Speaker 5 01:34:19 
Yeah, yeah, and the tarps. 

Mike Crispin 01:34:23 
See you, bots. 

Nate McBride 01:34:24 
Yes, CBOT. So, anyway. 

Speaker 5 01:34:30 
How far do you think that really... 

Nate McBride 01:34:32 
Why aren't we asking those questions? 

Mike Crispin 01:34:37 
I think that there's a lot of questions. I mean, at least from the AI piece, there's sort of this dreamscape right now that people talking about how they'd be AI as the president of the United States. 

Mike Crispin 01:34:49 
I mean, people have ramped that stuff up too. It's like decision -making. We were talking a couple of episodes again ago, Nate, right? And just to talk about decision -making and AI. I mean, the exponential growth and speed of this thing. 

Mike Crispin 01:35:01 
You know, I don't... Can you have a bunch of creative and skilled and industry knowledge, all feeding all this data up to a decision -maker? That's an AI decision -maker. 

Nate McBride 01:35:18 
And well, that's a great question. I mean that's a wall. I think wally level two I mean wally level two 

Mike Crispin 01:35:25 
Well, are we willing to total total pie in the sky? But it's just a question of where does it begin and end? I mean, it's great. 

Nate McBride 01:35:31 
It's a great question though, like where do we where do we concede a decision at what level do we say? Humans humans human humans human. Okay. Now we can allow bots. So if I was to say, okay I don't need Anybody until I get the VP level everyone below that's a bot Not everybody but every since me by a bot my VP has to then sort out whether the bots right or wrong before it comes to me well, a doesn't that immediately make my job useless because I have a VP to do it for me and and and likewise B How do we how we validated those bots like ultimately? 

Nate McBride 01:36:10 
This is very didactic question. We don't have to get into it ultimately, but It brings up a good point in terms of how oh my god, so John Sonner runs this wonderful monthly biotech beers thing in Cambridge area and he asked the exact same question. 

Nate McBride 01:36:30 
Let me just find his email real quick from from today He does this wonderful job of bringing people together for these beer and learns Hold on wait for it I'm gonna cut out this pause 

Joel Nichols 01:36:49 
Can I throw? Can I fill you up where you're looking related up so? 

Nate McBride 01:36:52 
So, so he says, over the past month, I have met up with several smart, ambitious founders slash company builders who have become completely disillusioned with the opportunities and biotech to the point where they are rethinking their entire careers. 

Nate McBride 01:37:06 
The slow study shift in power dynamics from labor, and he puts in quotes founders builders to capital and quotes venture investors has continued unabated for the past few years. As a result, the opportunities may be more compelling in other industries, like consumer enterprise tech, where higher competition and ownership levels are the norm. 

Nate McBride 01:37:30 
For years, top tier venture investors have lamented the lack of skilled experience management teams, pointing to this as a major limitation on the number of investible companies. This is directly contributing to the reduction in the number of biotech financings and the mega rounds that have become trendy. 

Nate McBride 01:37:49 
If we see brain drain away from our sector, or talented younger management teams are looking elsewhere. Where do we end up. And then he answers the question by saying, nowhere good. And in reality, these management teams. 

Nate McBride 01:38:06 
And I like mine, but they go as a group from company to company funding dries up. Well, let's go over here. Funding dries up. Okay, go over here. And what's the what's the what are the x factors in this well new company name new round of funding new molecule, but also new head of it. 

Nate McBride 01:38:32 
Right. New, new second string comes in. So like that the top group stays together. But the second string changes. And the top group knows everything and they're sort of all you know buddy buddy etc but the second string has to change because you know people move on and they rotate. 

Nate McBride 01:38:54 
You know we all rotate jobs will probably all do each other's job at least one time in this career in this lifecycle. So, the CIO role, it isn't so important to be to be like a CIO as they're like there's a there's a there's a vacuum for a person to put their button a seat and make decisions for this group of people to get them to a round of financing. 

Nate McBride 01:39:19 
So they can hopefully make it to the next round of financing and get bought. And this person who goes in that seat. Are they really the person we think that they are like am I so self aggrandizing that I think I mean I'm so important. 

Nate McBride 01:39:34 
I'm going to affect the outcomes of this company. No, no, no. There's a group of people that decided to focus on a molecule for clinical research, based on a certain amount of money. I'm, I'm like helping. 

Nate McBride 01:39:48 
I'm holding their hand through it as an as a technologist. But to think that I'm a CIO. Somehow, I have some sort of big dramatic effect. And there are CIOs that work for very very very large companies who have the same vision they think that they're making some sort of dramatic impact. 

Nate McBride 01:40:09 
They're merely like taking a left or right and in the fork in the road. I don't go this way. I don't know. Let's drop slack. And we're going to go over to something more secure. That's like my big decision for the year. 

Joel Nichols 01:40:27 
But if you've, you're not wrong at all. And at the same time, it's almost more prevention. I like to think we're, we're enablers, but some of it's preventing the mess that will happen if you don't have an architect, if you don't have someone says turn right, turn left, you know, um, since, since you already have talked about what a big, uh, football fan you are, I'll use the great analysis. 

Nate McBride 01:40:51 
Biggest football fan. Ask me anything about anything. 

Joel Nichols 01:40:54 
It's good. You know, the offensive line is often what's referred to an IT because it is, you know, block and tackling it is making sure that all the things work appropriately and things will look really bad if you don't do it. 

Joel Nichols 01:41:09 
And that's where it becomes really important. And the teams that don't have that suffer so badly because the star players can't actually operate the way they need. But no, we don't score touchdowns. We don't, you know, make those big plays by themselves. 

Joel Nichols 01:41:27 
But by not being there, by not being able to make that happen, you can severely limit a company's opportunity to move from one phase to another. 

Nate McBride 01:41:41 
Well, so, um, it's all valid. You, I mean, hyperbole aside, you mentioned that they suffer so badly. And I like the O -line reference. I do kind of understand what you're saying with that, even though I have no concept of, of what an O -line really does, except get hit, um, by big people. 

Nate McBride 01:42:08 
So if they suffer so badly, why then would we do that? Like, why then would we put, I mean, as an IT leader, Joel, why would you put a group of people out in front, take the bullets if your job, if your job, like, wouldn't you be on the other side where you're in fact, um, so far ahead of the question that your O -line is effectively just opening gates, people to constantly run through them and score touchdowns. 

Nate McBride 01:42:39 
How about that for a minute? 

Joel Nichols 01:42:41 
Yeah, that's not bad. That's not bad. I'm gonna stay with the football analogy but we have some football fans still listening to us, but Sometimes the running back cuts back and goes a different direction 

Nate McBride 01:42:52 
Oh, my God. 

Joel Nichols 01:42:53 
You have nothing to do except take the shots at that point, take the hits because all of your great game plan you had falls apart and you want the running back to have the capability to make those changes. 

Joel Nichols 01:43:06 
But at that point in time, your foresight didn't help because the business pivoted and now I'm back to business. They pivoted and they said, hey, instead of this molecule, we're moving on to this particular platform entirely. 

Joel Nichols 01:43:18 
And you sit there and go, hmm, well, we can make that work, but there's a reaction we have to do in our tech stack because it wasn't set up for this type of data and this speed in which you need to access it and the type of analytics you're putting across it. 

Joel Nichols 01:43:37 
So, but what are you doing? 

Nate McBride 01:43:41 
What if the running back got arrested for DUI right before the game? That's just kidding. That's never happened before. No, I get what you're saying. I mean, oh, my God. Like there's so many layers, but we only have a limited time. 

Nate McBride 01:43:58 
But the point is that. If the CIO is supposed to be this person who is seeing the big picture and putting shit together, right? Like that's what you've all defined. Like we've all said this now. Why are we still responding in the perspective of like hoping someone comes through to you to use the metaphor one more time with a play? 

Nate McBride 01:44:23 
Like we should already have seen the entire game. We should know how we should know the outcome of the game. And this is, again, the point of if I have somebody in my company, and I'm going to pretend I'm a CEO for a minute, if I have somebody in my company who is just like so good on knowing what's going on industry wise, they're so good at knowing what's going on across all things. 

Nate McBride 01:44:51 
And they can come to me and say, you know what? We should go with you and I. Because now is the time to do it. Well, first of all, 

Joel Nichols 01:45:00 
in person. 

Nate McBride 01:45:02 
That person's affecting what will eventually be a huge waterfall of decision making because they're so good at analyzing the potential versus the current. They can make the decision on that Delta and then apply it downstream. 

Nate McBride 01:45:17 
I mean, the CIO might be able to do this, but the CIO has a bias. We have a bias. We have a budget. We have people that work for us who may not all be skilled enough to do this kind of pivot. So we have all these limitations as we have to factor in as variables. 

Nate McBride 01:45:33 
Whereas that person just says, yeah, we're going to GAI. Um, but you make a good point or multiple good points and you have to factor those things into, it's like, uh, it's, it's a chicken or the egg scenario. 

Nate McBride 01:45:52 
And so, but 

Mike Crispin 01:45:54 
If you've got a strong CIO donated, if that's if that's role is already established, then you're already being asked, there's not someone coming out of the business saying we're going to do this. You're already at the table for that discussion, right? 

Nate McBride 01:46:07 
Is that person a CIO, Mike? 

Mike Crispin 01:46:10 
Yeah, I would say you right today, I would say that is a CIO. It's at a company where the CIO is sitting at the table. When LRP is put together or decisions are made around mergers and acquisitions type of things where they've they hire these roles specifically for that to be the business partner to the management perspective is like the CIOs got this. 

Mike Crispin 01:46:42 
So I'm not going to if they're not they don't got it. I'm going to go get someone else who can right and maybe the CIOs role is diminished at the company, but you're you're nailing it. You're that you're that stakeholder that leader that that's they're going to there. 

Mike Crispin 01:46:57 
They want you to be the decision maker on those things and that's why they've hired you. That's true. I don't think it's I don't think it's always the case. I'm just saying that I think that in a perfect world. 

Mike Crispin 01:47:08 
That's what they're looking for when they hire a C level IT executive as someone who's who they can trust with that decision. Yeah, that's why they may be more of the suit at the table sometimes right they're not they're not as they're viewed that way because they have to manage up and really, that's a big part of their job is managing the team the strategy and managing expectations of leadership and being that thought partner on key business decisions not technology decisions, 

Mike Crispin 01:47:40 
but key business decisions. Some of those larger jet blue they go to the CIO probably and they asked him or chief technology officer and say, how we enhancing the product, we trust you, you're the one who needs to be accountable for how we drive that strategy. 

Mike Crispin 01:47:55 
You know, I think it's I remember I met the jet blue CIO once and it was like that. That was a big his role of product. He was focused on the product and he had the IT organization, which was a huge responsibility operationally and compliance risk innovation wise but from a he was focused on the front facing product size of the side of the company. 

Mike Crispin 01:48:19 
It may not be as much of the case in life sciences. I mean, it definitely 

Nate McBride 01:48:23 
We're not generally making things that create revenue, you know, we're not like necessarily a straight line back to revenue. We're usually a very light gray like you can barely even see it dotted hashed line back to 

Mike Crispin 01:48:38 
I know there is the dream of sort of selling data in the past or creating data sets in the past that doesn't, at least in this smaller medium stack, it doesn't seem like that's happening as much. 

Nate McBride 01:48:48 
Well, if you're if you're in therapeutic or device development, you're not making a single dollar from it. You're it's just a cross center. But, you know, you bring up a couple of points or a couple of points are generated by what you said. 

Nate McBride 01:48:59 
Number one, how operational is the CIA need to be? If you have a CIO that's truly not operational, they are simply a decision maker. Then are they still a CIO? I'll ask that question. Pause right there. 

Nate McBride 01:49:11 
Secondly, if the CIO is not holding up their end of the bargain and therefore they are not doing their job, then whose problem is that? Who determines if the CIO can actually make a decision on a point and if their decision that they made is bad, you would need somebody else to counterpoint that decision. 

Nate McBride 01:49:33 
So there's that. Number three, if there's no CIA. 

Mike Crispin 01:49:36 
That's true of any direct report into the, or not true of any one of the reports from the executive team. 

Nate McBride 01:49:43 
And the question in this particular discussion, it's worth answering because what's below the CIO. And then three, if there's no CIO, just some director who got, you know, thrown in this role, we don't apply the same rubric. 

Nate McBride 01:50:02 
Like if we, if I say, okay, you're, you're, you've got 20 years experience and you're going to come in and lead the startup company, you have 50 employees, they get their series a funding, they certainly have a million in the bank, but you're an IT director. 

Nate McBride 01:50:18 
I mean, the de facto head of IT, but you're an IT director. 

Speaker 5 01:50:21 
Yeah. 

Nate McBride 01:50:23 
No way they have a seat at the table, right? But they're an IT director. They're for the head. Are they just as responsible as a CIO? 

Joel Nichols 01:50:32 
They fall in, so your question one and three are very interlinked. Question one is someone who's operating like the director. And forget titles for a moment, but that's exactly what they are at that point in time. 

Joel Nichols 01:50:43 
And number three, I mean, you're getting paid like that. And at that point, if they give you a seat at the table, and on one hand, that's great. But then you have to question a little bit on kind of the value, because you are providing unique value, which should be at an enterprise level. 

Joel Nichols 01:50:59 
So. 

Speaker 5 01:51:00 
Thank you. 

Joel Nichols 01:51:00 
Yeah. 

Nate McBride 01:51:01 
Yeah, but that's an industry problem Joel like if basically I know I'm not a CIO, but I'm doing the same job as the CIO would do right. Isn't there. I mean that's a problem. 

Joel Nichols 01:51:18 
Yeah, it it is. And then we were laggards in life science in a number of reasons, right. And I think we're seeing the same in the evolution of the CIO role. So I find this whole topic fascinating because it could go a number of ways. 

Joel Nichols 01:51:33 
And, you know, some of it. I'm a look first in the mirror kind of person. And so, you know, we, we as so anyone who is listening, who's an IT leader and aspiring IT leader CIO type as far as head of IT will use that term. 

Joel Nichols 01:51:49 
We need to be enterprise thought leaders. We need to be business first people. We need to be people who have the foresight and the partnership with all of the groups in such a way that technology is a byproduct of what we're doing. 

Nate McBride 01:52:11 
Yeah, interesting word byproduct. Yeah, I mean, we're basically strategy first or ideally strategy first, and then outcome second. Yeah, you know, we have the vision, and then we have the execution. Don't need to be a CIO to do that. 

Nate McBride 01:52:35 
You can be a four year in IT manager and do that. Yeah, it's interesting. And I think you're right, we can talk about this particular point forever. I want to just make the case that the CIO role, as we've all come to learn, we've all had an opportunity to be it. 

Nate McBride 01:52:58 
We've all been it. We've all done, we've all IT leaders right now. And what's changed in the last 25 years versus what's coming that that leadership role. 10 years from now, will you be as important in your role right now as you as you will in 10 years? 

Nate McBride 01:53:22 
How key will your role be in 10 years? 

Speaker 5 01:53:30 
I think the rule was. 

Nate McBride 01:53:32 
Most of my role can be given to somebody else in 10 years. 

Mike Crispin 01:53:38 
10 years is a long time. Anything's possible in 10 years, I would say. And they're using our imagination here. So yeah, I'm just saying that I think that 10 years from now, I do think the role is still important as long as, in life sciences, as long as the trajectory of we need one group to manage our technology. 

Mike Crispin 01:53:59 
We need one budget. We need cybersecurity. If these things don't change in terms of the profile of the role, I think it's still around. I think it's still an important role. I don't necessarily agree that it needs to be. 

Mike Crispin 01:54:14 
I guess in 10 years, there's a lot that's going to change. There's a lot of automation as business in the box, potentially, for some of these smaller companies. There may be consultancies and programs that IT is more of a program than it is a department. 

Mike Crispin 01:54:29 
There's also ways, I think, to skin it in the next 10 years. But somebody does have to lead it and have a cross -functional view. But if the whole organization is being kind of, if someone comes up with a new model, similar to what Joel, you were talking about the kind of the four stovepipes, if the full business model changes, that will affect the CIO. 

Mike Crispin 01:54:52 
If someone comes out with a better way to run a business and it's hugely successful from a revenue perspective and they're doing this innovative new way of managing their business, it'll all change. I think that it's going to take a few pioneers to go out and show that there's a new way to run a business with new roles, maybe community -driven model or program -driven model, small team -driven model. 

Mike Crispin 01:55:19 
There's all sorts of research on different ways to run and lead businesses that are kind of thinking outside of the traditional model. So I think if that happens, and the CIO role can completely change in some respects because it could be more of a program or a shared type opportunity, leveraging some of the tool sets and mindsets that we can buy and rent over the next decade as opposed to having to have them in -house. 

Mike Crispin 01:55:51 
It could really change things. 

Joel Nichols 01:55:53 
There are some examples too when I think about, you're right, maybe the role needs to encompass other things. But to put a bit of a positive spin on, I can think of two CIOs that I've worked for in the past who actually have roles now that have expanded in the biotech space, in the pharmaceutical space. 

Joel Nichols 01:56:16 
So one of them, Silji Abraham, I've worked with him in the past. He started as a CIO for West Pharmaceuticals. He's now the CTO. It's a change you don't often see, right? But he's been able to show the technology beyond, you know, it's showing that technology doesn't have to be all about the the molecules in the science, but it also doesn't have to be just about IT. 

Joel Nichols 01:56:39 
He's done a great job combining it. Another one, Wafa Famiya, is with Zoetis. So she came in as CIO, CDO, and she's fantastic leader, and they've seen that. They've made her now president of a few countries in the organization and expanded her role beyond the traditional CDO role. 

Joel Nichols 01:57:01 
And I think in both cases that is a model for those of us who lead the IT to understand that we really understand what it means to make business decisions and to partner and to grow and to expand. There are opportunities. 

Nate McBride 01:57:20 
Well, that's good because the next question I had and notice the very subtle segue there was on these opportunities themselves. So if IT could be run or there could be a decentralized model in which case there's a head of IT, CIO or not, who understands how the business runs and all the nuance and the technological responsibilities of merging all these platforms and making them communicate, et cetera, 

Nate McBride 01:57:52 
et cetera, could that not be a single person who then has a department that they bring in and or is not an employee that actually comes in with a department or is hired as an external group, again, not an MSP, but a function within the company that's contracted or consulted whose sole job is to basically displace the IT department and replace it with a more faster moving mechanism, one that isn't sort of held back by traditional corporate tropes or is there no room for that? 

Nate McBride 01:58:42 
And then I'll ask another follow up question, which is if there's no room for that, if the people must all be full time employees in the department, we think about the next five years, even what roles are we talking about? 

Mike Crispin 01:59:00 
Well, I think those are the Accenture model, right? I mean, people could go and get a department from Accenture and, and run, run an IT or a great in that respect at a cost, but still someone has to manage that relationship. 

Mike Crispin 01:59:15 
Sometimes that's a CFO or whatnot. Um, but I do think there's elements of continuity and it's your companies growing and building bridges and systems. Will those systems just run themselves as if you're kind of on that consultancy track, or if you only have one leader in IT that's managing it all. 

Mike Crispin 01:59:39 
They're going to have a specific style and strategy and, you know, background. And is that person going to be harder to replace if there's, you know, they win the lottery or whatnot is, is, and then, you know, is that role if they're good at, I imagine they've created a pathway for if they leave or go somewhere else, but it's, so it's a good to have another person there. 

Mike Crispin 02:00:02 
I feel like if you're, if you're going to have any resident knowledge internally, it's just not just one person. And then you start having that redundancy discussion around other parts of your function, which leads you to build perhaps a department. 

Mike Crispin 02:00:17 
Um, but I, I do think that there's kind of the, it's hard to say it real. I think really depends on the business and what you're trying to achieve. If that model would, would work sliding in kind of an external group with one internal leader. 

Mike Crispin 02:00:32 
I think it just depends on what stage you're at and what you want to build. 

Nate McBride 02:00:39 
Well, I mean, we've certainly seen the bargaining industry, the MSP model. Sure. We know it doesn't work without leadership and all kinds of guidance, et cetera. 

Mike Crispin 02:00:48 
Yeah, you need to have a runbook, you know, and that has to be. 

Joel Nichols 02:00:53 
Does the model look a little like a head of a PMO? A lot of times a head of a PMO is a very lean organization, maybe a couple of project managers. Sometimes the head of the PMO, I think this is where you're getting, which is kind of, actually the project managers sit cross -functionally. 

Joel Nichols 02:01:10 
So they are an individual contributor, but they are a thought leader, and they are also the one who drives the process to make sure it works, and they are facilitating across all the functions, and they have a seat at the table because of the work that they do. 

Joel Nichols 02:01:24 
I think the piece that's still missing in that kind of analogy is what we're talking about, which is the strategy. Understanding the strategy for the data, the technology, all of those pieces still come together. 

Joel Nichols 02:01:36 
But could that be an individual contributor with a combination of outsourced, and I think that really now I'm back to your decentralized model. It's just the ultimate decentralized model, where even individual contributor and everything else is decentralized. 

Nate McBride 02:01:53 
That's what we're coming back to. 

Mike Crispin 02:01:55 
which is managing IT like a program, right? Like having a distributed horizontal model. 

Nate McBride 02:02:01 
Yeah, I don't think we all, I don't think we dispute the fact that it's possible. The question is compared to a matrix model, which we're, we're familiar with. Right. If we were to say, okay, listen, there's going to be one person whose job is called, what's called CIO, whatever they're responsible for all technological decisions in the company. 

Nate McBride 02:02:25 
They, they assume risk and all their stuff, but they're responsible for managing this team that comes in from another place. Um, they can change it out. They can manipulate any way they want. It's basically their working group of hands. 

Nate McBride 02:02:44 
Is that an improved model over having all these FTEs or is it still going to be that five years from now, the best model is to have FTEs working for you. 

Joel Nichols 02:03:01 
My hypothesis is, and I, uh, this goes back in time when I had a group of process automation reporting into me and the question came in. Should we have them sit with the business units that they support or do we have them centralized and all sitting together? 

Joel Nichols 02:03:17 
They're all. If they're all out sitting with the business, they are learning what's going on with the business, they're very in tune and they can help build the right optimized automation programs to run the equipment. 

Joel Nichols 02:03:30 
But then they lack the shared common programming and ideas and helping each other. So you bring them all central, they do that very well, but they lose track of what's going on. So someone says, so what's the right answer? 

Joel Nichols 02:03:46 
It depends on who the people are. If you have a group of people who naturally want to know what's going on with the business so much that they get out of their chair to go find out and sit with them all the time, then centralize them. 

Joel Nichols 02:03:58 
Because you need to force that part of their DNA, which is secondary to their, I want to go what's out with the business. If they are one that they can't wait to talk best programming practices, put them out with the business because they need to focus on that because it's secondary. 

Nate McBride 02:04:14 
Oh, Joe, it's like, Joe, it's like you, it's like you read the script. 

Joel Nichols 02:04:19 
It's good to have one. Thank you for that. What's the next line? Thank you for setting up this podcast. This is the best one. 

Nate McBride 02:04:28 
podcast is so amazing. So then let me ask this question. Why not, on that same track of thought, since the business is already becoming so savvy, how to do things on their own? Why not push back more on the business to be it? 

Nate McBride 02:04:50 
And let me ask, let me let me frame this in context. If I say to my whole company, you're now all local administrators of your laptops, which they are. I say, okay, you're responsible for installing XYZ now. 

Nate McBride 02:05:03 
If you have any questions, watch this video, or go to the vendor's help site and submit ticket. And the business is okay with that. Because they've been doing that for a couple years now. How am I transformed it? 

Nate McBride 02:05:20 
I mean, I basically said, like, I'm a big picture guy. I'll make ERP work with HRIS and all the big, fun, fancy things and compliance and Michigan stuff. But when it comes to like day to day problems, now you got to solve on your own. 

Nate McBride 02:05:34 
You got a laptop, you have the internet, Google it. Have we conceivably sort of reached that point where we can do this now? And if we did it, would that answer the question that sort of you were just talking about? 

Nate McBride 02:05:50 
Which is yes, we can have an IT leader. Yes, we could potentially have a consultancy. But even more important than that, where do we draw the line and what people should be able to do on their own? 

Mike Crispin 02:06:06 
You still have a size so right off to the side. So let's say there's a there's this you still have someone focused in cyber security. I imagine. 

Nate McBride 02:06:15 
somebody's putting a perimeter in, they're putting a security stack in. Yeah, you have basic controls, yes. Okay. 

Mike Crispin 02:06:22 
Okay, yeah, that makes sense. 

Nate McBride 02:06:24 
It's not like complete wild west. 

Mike Crispin 02:06:26 
No, no, that's what I mean. Like, I think that it's that that's where the component of empowering people just have to have that balance, you know, that's. 

Nate McBride 02:06:34 
Yeah. So you as the de facto IT lead slash CISO person would create an environment where you can safely control the outside and tell people, okay, there's no IT help desk, there's no like, whatever, if you really just really totally screwed it up and you can't solve it, yes, you can call me, but otherwise you have to solve your own problems. 

Nate McBride 02:07:01 
I mean, have we, are we coming to that day today? We already have already reached that day. I'm asking because I feel like in a large part, we have already exceeded that point. 

Speaker 5 02:07:16 
Mm. 

Joel Nichols 02:07:16 
It's always a matter of measuring the efficiency, right? Like what time does it take to answer your own problems versus let's bring this to the consumer world. If you have a problem at home, how many of you go, oh, gee, I should call and ask what is wrong or put a ticket in with this product that I bought. 

Joel Nichols 02:07:36 
We are probably more wired to first figure out if there's any way possibly we can solve it ourselves because we know that'll be faster than trying to explain to someone moving through the different tiers of what's going on. 

Joel Nichols 02:07:49 
So I think it's a matter of efficiency. If you can have people solve the problem themselves in a more efficient manner and also depending a little bit on their level, because I'll say someone who's a research associate who has to spend a half hour to figure something out on their own cost wise, sorry, but cost per hour is not a whole lot different than help desk professional doing it. 

Joel Nichols 02:08:13 
So it's about the same effort, seems net neutral. My CEO on the other hand should not be spending 30 minutes trying to figure out what's going on with his computer because that person's time is very, very valuable and we need to make sure that we expedite that in a different way. 

Nate McBride 02:08:35 
Well, that's, I mean, you just brought us into a whole new world there, Joel, because you answered and asked another question at the same time. So the role of the CIO or this head of IT, right? Are they becoming a class warrior, essentially saying, okay, everything below here, follow the help desk videos. 

Nate McBride 02:09:06 
Everything above here is actually different level of support for you or, and, or different level of sort of like triage for you. And I'm just, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but ultimately we think about IT. 

Nate McBride 02:09:21 
If the CIO has to do this, where they create a level in this fictional world, a level where below this solve your own problem above this, you get white glove treatment. Are they still a CIO or are they just the help desk person? 

Nate McBride 02:09:38 
And honestly, the line between CIO and help desk person is so blurred. 

Joel Nichols 02:09:52 
this. Especially given the day of the week, right? 

Nate McBride 02:09:56 
And so you find yourself in a meeting with 10 other executives and the zoom phone, isn't working all fucking turn to every time. Oh, Joel, you're here. Fix it. But yeah, exactly. And you can't say no. 

Nate McBride 02:10:17 
So again, the question of the CIO role. What's the CIO was in that room and they turn to Joel and Joel's like, yeah, actually, I have no idea. Um, why don't you call the help desk? 

Joel Nichols 02:10:31 
Yeah, I asked him I'm here. 

Nate McBride 02:10:33 
together 

Joel Nichols 02:10:34 
Take it in. 

Nate McBride 02:10:37 
That's yeah. I mean, imagine that. I mean, we can all fantasize about that sort of schism happening where like, I have no idea, you should call is you call the help desk. I'm just the guy who integrates ERP with HR. 

Mike Crispin 02:10:56 
In a weird way, if you message your, you know, tech lead or your help desk person, that can be a good thing. If you're trying to fix it up and fix the zoom meeting, you instantly jump on that. I have heard, you know, and been complimented that I did ask the help desk that I didn't just go and do it. 

Mike Crispin 02:11:21 
Because that's not what they pay me to do. Right. Yeah. For you to reach out to your tech lead and have them come up and be available like that. I think there's also an element of, yeah, they're coming up, they're going to help us. 

Mike Crispin 02:11:35 
So be out in a minute. Let's let's talk. Let's use this time wisely. I'm not going to, so I can, I can get what I need to get out of that meeting. I have a seat at the table and to bring that person in to fix it is, um, I think is a, is a good, it's hard to do because you want to please them and fix it. 

Mike Crispin 02:11:51 
And you're probably frustrated inside. Why the fuck isn't this working? This should work. But to be, to be happy, be able to have that resource coming in, fix it and they come in and they fix it like that. 

Mike Crispin 02:12:00 
And everyone's like, Oh, I love, I love Carlos. I love John. I love Bob, you know, whoever great, great. It's great. We got them, you know, um, but if I'm fumbling around with it and I can't fix it, that's even worse. 

Mike Crispin 02:12:16 
Right. It's like, Oh, now I'm stressing out and I got to present in five minutes, you know? Right. Right. 

Nate McBride 02:12:23 
Um, no, it's true. It's, um, if again, it comes right back to the same question we've been asking. Yeah. Like if the CIO is in a room and the CIO has been empowered to make all these big decisions, but all of a sudden there's a problem, the CIO becomes diminished in a second. 

Nate McBride 02:12:39 
So is a CIO really a CIO or are they just a CIO when they need it? And then a help desk person when they don't. 

Mike Crispin 02:12:49 
just saying I think a CIO is at the table at a lot of bigger companies and they are not going to fix the problem. They're not going to do that. They're going to bring the right person in to fix it no matter how desperate it is and they're getting that if they have a good service and support model that person will be there and they'll fix it in five minutes. 

Joel Nichols 02:13:06 
And it does, it is interesting. I mean, you're, you're exactly right. And I am guilty of jumping in to fix it. Um, I think it's just part of my nature, but it can be problematic because it does devalue the role. 

Joel Nichols 02:13:17 
If you have a problem, if you're sitting there and we're like, why does this Excel spreadsheet might, I don't understand my actuals don't match what my budget is, but it should, do you immediately throw it at the CFO and ask them to fix your budget? 

Joel Nichols 02:13:30 
I've never seen that happen. 

Nate McBride 02:13:33 
That's a great, I mean, it's a great example. It's the culture we create when we get into a company. And by virtue of the fact that we start in small companies, the culture we create is, listen, all of IT is hands -on. 

Nate McBride 02:13:47 
But it's not too hard to transition away from that moment. It's the actions that you do that sort of demonstrate how it's going to be. But the point is that if we do it, which is great, but if the executives are so inured to the fact that the last few companies that they were at, the person didn't do it. 

Nate McBride 02:14:09 
So I'm not calling for like a call to arms here for all of our IT colleagues, but at the same time, anyway, we're blabbering the point. Let me ask this last question here. That was good. This last question, which is in this fantastical world that we're talking about, where IT is able to sit in a room and not fix the Zoom phone. 

Nate McBride 02:14:37 
And we're the facto experts for joining platform A to B, all these things. How are we going to do that? And more importantly, how are we going to define a department that will allow us to do that? In this future department, and I know Mike, it's hardly five years on the road, but if you imagine hard enough, you can see what 29 look like. 

Nate McBride 02:15:05 
And we know people are saying about 26, 27, 28 terms of Gen AI and all the crazy shit they're thinking of. It's not so hard to think back, think forward to that point. Think about your department and how you're going to transform where you are today. 

Nate McBride 02:15:23 
You have an NF2 to that department in the future. Joel, same with you. You have a huge department, Joel. What's the Delta look like? What are you going to do between now and then? How are you going to write that into a strategy? 

Nate McBride 02:15:43 
Thank you. Is my zoom broken? I was given mic. 

Joel Nichols 02:15:50 
You said Mike's name first, so I'm letting him go first. I went quiet there. 

Nate McBride 02:15:54 
Just making sure my Zoom was working. I'm sorry. I'm not fixing it. I'm not going to have it. 

Mike Crispin 02:15:58 
I've just heard, but I'm not gonna, I don't think I'm going to have an official five year strategy. Number one, but number two, I'm talking about 

Nate McBride 02:16:08 
our individual plan like if you if you if you sort of in your own mind personally didn't tell anybody privately mike crispin had a plan like five years yes the we call it the crispin manifesto five years from now the manifesto comes to fruition what's the delta like how have you gone from today like everything you know your entire past you've gone from today to that the execution of the manifesto what happens is it upskilling is it you have to go on your own personal technology journey 

Mike Crispin 02:16:48 
I think what I would say is if there was a need to hire. So right now I think almost to that stovepipe models, risk, someone focused on risk, someone focused on the overall enterprise architecture and or that's something that's somewhat of some background and could kind of straddle for the short term depending on what my resource allotment is. 

Mike Crispin 02:17:15 
But whoever is hired and whatever roles are created is to have people that have a very strong front wheel that could communicate, that could connect, that has some semblance of organization and industry experience. 

Mike Crispin 02:17:33 
But having the flexibility of having a more generalist I think model over time is really important because these small farmers change quite quickly, processes change, surveying the business is important and how that's changing and how that's growing, what skill sets are hired within the outside of the IT organization. 

Mike Crispin 02:17:55 
There are a couple hires just in the last few months and one that's been there for a while that is a very talented technologist and very, very much partnered with IT and this is a great background. If more of those people come in that could change the people strategy. 

Mike Crispin 02:18:12 
But around data integrity is important, right? Having good data model, building that out, understanding the data we have and where it needs to go from here is important. Data governance is very important. 

Mike Crispin 02:18:24 
So the strategy is probably more focused on data and data security on the small footprint that we have and over the next five years to be an enabler data and a protector of data. And depending now as we go to a commercial state, there's think other external capabilities that are required, better data and analytics capabilities, better overall compliance and regulated capabilities. 

Mike Crispin 02:18:55 
Say if a company, a company goes to a public state, small company, there's other constraints that are there need to be, that may be in place that we need to build for. It really depends on the business strategy and that would be where I would focus my three -year plan or two -year plan. 

Mike Crispin 02:19:14 
It depends on the business strategy. The things I can talk about, people, front wheel, communicators, connectors with the assumption that we will have some technology that if we're talking five years that we'll be able to do some of these things for us. 

Mike Crispin 02:19:30 
Hard to teach great connection and front wheel capabilities. I think, whereas I think some of the technical and data and analytics, huge skill sets. People have a great background there and they're not replaceable, but some of the automation of data may be more easier to perform, just like some of our integration tools are easier today. 

Mike Crispin 02:19:54 
That might be in a better place in five years. 

Nate McBride 02:19:59 
Joel. 

Joel Nichols 02:20:00 
Ironically, I've got a manifesto here for five years out. Yeah, I and I can't read. I'm not going to read it all because I would give away too much secret sauce. 

Nate McBride 02:20:13 
No, no, no, don't uh 

Joel Nichols 02:20:15 
Yeah, I'll share it. I just upload it. Yeah, I mean, it's one of those, but I'll say it kind of, I try to hit all of the aspects of, you know, what falls into a, you know, a digital IT organization. So first from a team standpoint, being solution oriented, collaborative, business centric, accountable. 

Joel Nichols 02:20:35 
I've got, I got some bullets on all of those, on what that actually means and the level of maturity, because you don't just flip a switch and have all of these. And that's why this is a, I'm calling it the manifesto for 2030. 

Joel Nichols 02:20:46 
It's going to take us time to get there, but I don't, I don't see any of the things I have in this aging out. It's, it should be resilient to time because these are attributes that any company is going to need. 

Joel Nichols 02:20:59 
So that's, that's the team, whatever size and shape that looks like, and that could be matrixed. And it could also be decentralized, quite frankly. So the next piece technologies, I mean, there's built technologies, purchase technologies and supported technologies, but making sure that we address all of those and they're following best practices and scalable, right size for the needs. 

Joel Nichols 02:21:26 
They have even things like data ecosystems, supporting analytics and AI, both, you know, zero trust, permissive infrastructure. Now those are all components in the technology stack. It's fun stuff. I think we, you know, we, at our core, we may be business partners, but we like technology and it's, it's helpful. 

Joel Nichols 02:21:46 
I think still to have that in the back pocket, then I've got my partner vendors in my ecosystem because we do outsource and I believe in it. I don't believe in outsourcing everything, but I believe it's an important piece, but the partners you have need to be people who take ownership. 

Joel Nichols 02:22:02 
They recognize the value of a win -win. They know processes and they're measurable. SLAs, don't just put them on paper. I like to talk about them. Costs matter, costs matter to both sides. We need to figure it out. 

Joel Nichols 02:22:17 
How do you leverage geographies where it makes sense? Where can we do things with volume? What can we do to make sure that we are getting the maximum value? The next components, the data driving the company, is it accessible and understandable with associated metadata? 

Joel Nichols 02:22:34 
Is it trusted from a source of truth, enhanced in value? I like to talk a lot about this, where you start with data, it has a value, but a lot of times it gets enhanced or progresses as potential of data as it moves through your life cycle in a company and secure data to make sure that it's secure for effective utilization. 

Joel Nichols 02:22:55 
And the last piece is for the company itself. This is kind of where it goes. So do they have clear and consistent use of the tools for the given application? Growing curiosity and usage of emerging technologies. 

Joel Nichols 02:23:08 
Data driven, knowledgeable in how to mine and present through visualization, articulate in their needs requirements, collaborative and involved through everything that we're doing combined and vigilant in the best cybersecurity practices. 

Nate McBride 02:23:24 
So that's awesome. Thank you for sharing that. Your manifesto 2030, you're the CIO of exemplar at Tessera. Are you still doing matrix IT? It might be some 

Joel Nichols 02:23:43 
How about if it's a hybrid, you know, I mentioned last time this digital champions and that's kind of what I start seeing maybe we don't grow it to the empires we used to have because the needs are so high right now for digital tools. 

Joel Nichols 02:23:58 
Don't have to have it all. 

Nate McBride 02:24:01 
And are you seeing that you're going to completely transform the roles that you have? Let me rephrase that. Would you still have traditional roles that you have today? Or do you see like a whole new type of roles evolving that you will need to hire for in your group? 

Joel Nichols 02:24:22 
I don't think it will be earth shattering, but I think you will have some new roles. This whole idea about a person in charge of user experience versus someone who maybe in the past was a help desk manager. 

Joel Nichols 02:24:35 
It's morphed, but it is slightly different, and it's kind of where it's focused. So I think there will be some roles that are morphed with maybe different titles and different kind of priority ones. 

Nate McBride 02:24:48 
Okay. Do you see more people in your group that are focused on experience versus for operational success? Or do you see a hybrid approach? Or do you see that there'll be a bigger need for more? I mean, let me rephrase this whole thing. 

Nate McBride 02:25:08 
Five even five years from now, when Windows, what the hell ever is 14 iOS, whatever is out. Do you expect to still need people to support that? Or do you think that this will be something where you need people doing more thinking work? 

Nate McBride 02:25:29 
More putting puzzle pieces together work than day to day resolution. 

Joel Nichols 02:25:38 
I think we're already moving away from as much resolution as we used to have. And that's where you tend to use more outsourcing. I remember you and I probably could be a whole nother podcast MSPs, the hell stories, the horror stories and the okay stories. 

Joel Nichols 02:25:55 
Right. 

Nate McBride 02:25:58 
MSPs are awesome. 

Joel Nichols 02:25:59 
Yeah, well, I mean, the truth is I find that MSPs work better today, not because MSPs have gotten better, but to your point, there's a little less focus on the need for support and I can internalize a little more thought leadership and experience oriented. 

Nate McBride 02:26:20 
Yeah, well, it's your timing's good. I just released a update on my chapter seven. Yesterday, I'm late on sub stack about MSPs. And I did talk a little bit about the, the needs that we have today for MSPs. 

Nate McBride 02:26:38 
And one of those, I mean, I think people always just like having external consulting firm in it. I think it's no different than having a group who's focused on, in my words, the experience, but the experience at an operational day to day level, you're focused on the experience at a, like, what's your overall data experience? 

Nate McBride 02:27:04 
How do you find things? How do you work? They're focused on the proactive experience. But here's the problem. MSPs don't do proactive. There's no margin. They do reactive. And so I think you and I talked about this too. 

Nate McBride 02:27:26 
There's no, there's no crossing that divide. 

Joel Nichols 02:27:31 
So, so yeah, boy, and I will need to eventually get some sleep here tonight, but I love this topic and I will just say, whenever I find that with a vendor, coming back to like effective partners and win -wins and costs. 

Joel Nichols 02:27:50 
So let's build the model differently. Let's compensate you for proactive work. It'll take some thought. I don't know that I have that. I don't have that sitting on my window here, but I'm sure it is possible. 

Joel Nichols 02:28:07 
And it's just, we have to really think that through and it doesn't fit the current model. 

Nate McBride 02:28:13 
Okay, good answer and I yeah, I realize this is uh, I mean again, there's so many things we talked about which could be their own episodes um This is one especially one of those so we'll We'll put you on ice right there and we'll come back to that another day because we will have an msp episode um, there's a lot to unpack with that so We'll pause there for tonight. 

Nate McBride 02:28:37 
I think what we did was we really truly got to the point of the cio's position We didn't answer some of the questions in terms of how we're going to actually do this But maybe we come back to that In a future date. 

Nate McBride 02:28:53 
Maybe we do have an episode three a secret episode three of this, uh series Um, so I want to thank you joel for being on mike as always and kevin Not being here, but also thank you So, uh, I want to remind everybody that if you like our show give us all the stars on whatever platform you use Don't be a dick Especially don't be a dick to it. 

Nate McBride 02:29:19 
We're hardworking folks just like you um We're trying to do the best we can we we don't control the way the cloud or internet works If shit's gonna break on its own, it's just gonna break And uh, you can call us and we'll help you sort it out Don't be a dick to old people either. 

Nate McBride 02:29:36 
They They're just trying to sort it out Sometimes they don't get things as fast as we do in terms of the internet and the fast -moving world of genera AI So, you know, give them a second. Maybe explain it to them Um, if they want to write a check in the checkout line instead of using their debit card or their iphone. 

Nate McBride 02:29:52 
That's cool You know just make some banter 

Joel Nichols 02:29:56 
Yeah, I love it. 

Nate McBride 02:29:58 
Just compliment them on their choice of, um, steak tips and, uh, whatever else they're making for dinner, maybe strike up a conversation, like maybe even help them get their shit to the car. Just don't be a dick. 

Nate McBride 02:30:08 
It's better for the world. Um, also have your pet spayed or neutered. Um, and just be a good person. Mike, and I'll be back next week, hopefully with Joel and or Kevin and, or other people, and we have other things to talk about. 

Nate McBride 02:30:25 
Um, Mike, you want to say anything or Joel parting words. 

Mike Crispin 02:30:31 
I'd say thank you to Joel. Thanks for all the insights and absolutely it's been it's been great. Getting to meet you too and talk to you a bit and it's been great. 

Joel Nichols 02:30:41 
No, I mean, I really appreciate it. This is fun. And, you know, if you invite me back, there's a good chance I'll make it back again, depending on whether or not Nate does the requisite editing you promised 

Nate McBride 02:30:55 
Oh, don't worry. I could cut out all the stuff. Basically everything that you said, Joel, I'm just going to cut it out. That's me, Mike and Kevin. 

Joel Nichols 02:31:03 
That's actually probably the best editing you could do, you know, just have me do an introduction and then be like, I don't remember him saying anything. 

Nate McBride 02:31:10 
Yeah, what happened to that guy, Joel? He intro'd, but then he left. No, it's all good. You're famous now. You tell everybody in the world that you're part of a podcast. 

Speaker 7 02:31:23 
Because we are awesome, adopt and oppose some. We need frozen Twinkies and Johnny Walker gold drinkies. The calculus of IT.