Well, today on our Tech for Business podcast, Kyle, our president and CEO, is joining us
to discuss questions business leaders should be asking their IT.
And I'm going to start us off not with the list that I gave you, but why are these conversations
important?
Why should business leaders even sit down with their IT departments?
It's important for them to sit down aerial just to really understand how technology has
changed over the course of time.
And is everybody aware technology is on a rapid change and always continuously evolves
much at a much faster pace than many are aware of.
And there are continuously new ways that technology can assist the business in automation and
allow them to have their workers and their staff to leverage that automation and direct
their energy elsewhere.
And I think it's important to sit down with the IT and their partners that they work with
to ask the questions, are we doing this the most effective way and are we effectively
making use of the new technology that is available to us?
Definitely.
Awesome.
So I came up with a few questions today and feel free to say, yes, this is a good one,
no it's not.
But the first one I have is about just overall planning.
What are current and future technology needs of our organization?
And I was hoping instead of answering that question, could you maybe explain why that
conversation is important?
Sure.
And as we opened up and started this conversation side of it, it is so, you know, it's a great
deal.
So critically important to look and ask those questions of are we using technology to us,
to the fullest potential that we can?
Can we automate certain things?
Things like artificial intelligence, AI is being, you know, definitely a very popular
topic in today's world side of that, which has, you know, tremendous capabilities of
introducing a lot of augmentation to a business process and allowing your staff and productivity
to use their energy and other, you know, probably customer facing or service facing ways.
That's a great example of it.
There's other ways of business intelligence data reporting, things that people are doing
manually.
It's just asking those questions and doing a deeper evaluation and taking a step back
from the business and looking at those processes you're doing, the steps people are taking,
how you're delivering the data and the assets to whoever you're delivering those services
to, and can technology help us in some way?
In many cases, you find a lot of organizations are, you know, we do it this way because we've
always done it this way.
And that's, you know, why it works.
It may not be, you know, leveraging technology to its fullest, which means you're not getting
the best return on your investment from that, or you're missing a potential small investment
relatively speaking to the net return it could give you.
And that's why I think it's critically important to take a closer look at that.
Definitely.
And my second question is kind of on that same vein, talking about what is the roadmap
for that technology implementation.
But then I kind of a second part about, you know, you talked about AI and automation,
an important conversation with between business leaders and IT might be who's responsible
when it comes to choosing those tools or implementing those upgrades.
And what does that kind of mean to you?
And why would that conversation be important?
Yeah, I think the who's responsible is important because I think it allows for, I think the
organizational leaders got to get together and understand each other.
And again, it's easy, I think to, you know, be deep in the woods and not see the forest
for the trees when you're doing your daily job.
You know, to take to work, you know, on the business side of that is as leaders and allow,
you know, the IT side of it with the business side to come together and have a conversation
to assess that I think is critically important.
So I think it's a joint effort, it needs to be because from, you know, an IT leader standpoint,
he's focused on the deliverable, he or she is going to be focused on the deliverable
of the technology as they've been requested, typically, you know, so they're trying to
maintain a service level and those other sides of it.
And they may be doing a very good job of that.
Meanwhile, the business side of it and the business leaders may be, you know, continuously
trying to use the technology as they've always used it, but then they may not understand
that there is new technologies that could benefit when you look at a process.
So best way to kind of speak for an example, when you see people that are exporting from
an ERP or an accounting system and then bringing it into Excel and then massaging the data
and then creating the reports and then emailing those reports to department leaders to make
a critical business decision or are we profitable as this product working, are we delivering
the core services to the individuals we're trying to serve?
Maybe that process takes, you know, two, three, four days to make that happen side of that.
So you have a critical time delta that gets introduced, bringing something like that into
BI and then maybe AI to do the processing, bring that into ours where it's almost instantaneous
or it's immediately just digested and presented to you and even the AI is highlighting immediately
areas of focus, you know, so that kind of quick side of it now just freed up, you know,
days of people's time to do other things.
But that doesn't happen unless there's a conversation and you understand, hey, wait a minute, do
you know we could potentially help you here and then we could do those things?
So that's, I think it's responsible, responsibility of all the leadership just to get together
and stop and ask, is this the best way to do it?
Yeah.
And do a little brainstorming session ultimately.
And I don't think it's a weekly thing, of course, but it's something that at least annually
should be an exercise just to say, is this the best way?
Yeah, definitely.
So my questions have kind of been focused around this high level planning.
But when we talk more about the day to day, especially when it comes to security and privacy,
and I know that you mentioned earlier, incident response, are those conversations things that
business leaders should be involved in and why or why not?
Yeah, I think in today's world, obviously, nobody's got the ability to say they're above
the risk of cybersecurity and what that can present to a business.
And many business leaders are losing sleep over the fear of what would happen if we have
an incident.
And others, I think that are not understanding the criticality that it could be, is the other
side of the coin.
And I think it's important to ask and go through that exercise of what would happen if we had
an incident and actually doing tabletop exercises, walking through the answer response, understanding
the full impact to the organization, because there are just so many components that come
into it.
If the unfortunate day were to come, having a plan and having that plan of action side
of that and realizing how it affects all parts of your organization is just so critical to
the success of how the organization moves forward.
And just like anything else, the planning is so paramount to that.
In many cases, you don't know what you don't know.
And I think assumptions are extremely dangerous.
There's the assumption, well, we have backups we can recover.
Well, that's only a very small percent of it.
The other side of it is the reality of how long it actually takes that you really, you're
not talking hours in many cases and answer responses, two plus weeks or more to get through
that side of it.
What does your organization do for weeks without access or how do they get access to some limited
amount of data?
The core functions you need to provide, all those discussions really need to be understood
organizationally.
Because again, as you get to each department, their view tends to be very limited to their
scope of responsibility.
And you need to kind of bring all those minds together to really paint the whole picture.
Because without that, it can be very painful to discover at the point of problem.
And that's what we want to avoid is making that discovery at that time.
And if you do that, it'll pay tremendous dividends to really understand what you need from that
digital information side of it to continue to provide and move forward.
And then ultimately, you can secure it even better.
Because then you can also use that exercise to say, okay, this is our critical point.
Why do we do to reduce the minimize the risk of that and turn that not from weeks to maybe
hours?
What can we do if this is ultimately the most critical asset we need to ensure we deliver
upon?
You can take some other actions on it.
But again, it only becomes clear when you come together.
You can.
It's too painful to discover elsewhere.
I think it's very dangerous on that.
Yeah, oh man, especially when it comes to that security.
I loved when you mentioned kind of bringing all of these people at the table.
So even though our conversation focuses a lot on like business leaders and IT, there
are plenty of people at this table.
And my next question kind of focuses at the end of the year when you're talking about
reflecting and measuring that value and the impact of technology.
Why might that conversation be important?
And why should all these people be at the table for that conversation?
Yeah, again, it's a similar discussion in the way that you're trying to understand of
how technology is being utilized within the organization side of that.
And it touches many people in many different ways.
And it's really finding the ways to measure the productivity impact of that technology
to say this is providing essentially this ROI saving X amount of time versus the way
we used to manually do it.
You know, people have always kind of understood that technology helps, but it's trying to
create the measurements of how much it's helping and can it help more?
So then you can measure then that return in their investment side of it for how you continue
to leverage new technologies and new ways of doing it and help to have people understand
the change impact that that could bring along as well.
Because traditionally when you approach and say, hey, we have this new technology.
So for example, the IT later may come in and say, I found this new AI application.
I think it's the greatest thing ever.
I want the organization to use it.
But without the support of their other leaders, department heads and the users of those applications,
that change can meet a tremendous amount of resistance.
People don't like change traditionally.
And they tend to resist it, even though it ultimately could help them.
So the more you bring them to the table and they understand the benefit of it and they're
part of that decision process and they're helping with the implementation of it and
you have those champions, it can ultimately, I think, speed up that adoption and then you
get their clear results and the return on it.
So that's again why it's important to bring everybody together, understand the challenges,
understand how they're using the technology, understand where there may be an efficiency
challenges in other areas, informational gaps, information delays.
All those places are clues that there's gaps that can be closed with technology.
And have those conversations, get those leaders involved that are non-IT, get them on that
part of the side of it so that you can have that champions internally to say, this is
a good thing.
This is going to make our lives better.
This will free us up to do some of these other things we've wanted to do, but can't.
Love it.
I love it.
And you kind of answered my last question in all of that and business leaders asking
their IT department what other support they need.
And I think you answered it perfectly.
Yeah.
Yeah, they're all related.
I mean, they all kind of come together, but it is, there is a theme here and it's really
just about that it isn't IT driving the technology.
IT is a partner in it and whoever is leading your IT and your organization, whether it's
a smaller organization where it has an executive with a partner or you have an IT leader in
the organization, whoever that may be, they need to be just a seat at the table with the
rest of the business to really leverage it.
The IT department or there's an operational support, absolutely, of just maintaining what
you have and ensuring the service levels of it.
But then there's the other side of it of how technology is actually working for the business.
And that is really where the rubber meets the road on, are you getting an ROI on technology?
And the companies we work with that truly see technology as an asset and it's helping
them deliver their services and products to their ultimate consumers of those in a much
better way are the ones that continuously reinvest into it because there is a measured
ROI.
There's a return of productivity and which helps the overall organization obviously thrive
better and maybe differentiate themselves in how they're delivering it and are the ones
that leverage it the best.
If you look at it as purely an expense and you never want to reassess it, you're probably
not going to be as happy, which again, it's kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.
You never do anything with it.
You just view it as a cost.
It's going to be that.
It's not going to ever manifest itself in anything further than that.
Yeah.
Well, thank you so much.
To close this out, I want to ask you one more question.
And that's, if business leaders have never sat down at their IT department, how might
they bridge that gap and how often should these conversations happen?
Yeah, I can't mention it really.
I do it at least once a year, but I would just approach them as a business leader, whoever
your IT side just say, I'd like to just sit down and discuss how we're using technology
in the business.
It may be a starting point and whether or not you bring your other department heads together
and start talking through how you're using technology, what processes are you using through
those?
You can bring a partner in such as CIT, some of that, maybe to help orchestrate that or
lead that discussion for you, to build some leading questions, to start asking people.
Just some tabletop exercises like that can be very powerful to have people start to realize
going, oh yeah, well, yeah, we do use it this way.
Because again, it's very habitual.
People get used to, we save the files to this file share and then they pull the file and
go through.
You don't think anything of it at some point, but when you have a fresh perspective and that
sometimes where it's good to bring in an outside person, and somebody may ask the question,
what isn't that?
What are you doing with that information?
Well, it gives us our sales commission, so that our sales people know what product to
sell, go through it.
Is that efficient for you?
How fast do you need that?
Would you need it faster?
Well, yeah, if we did it a little faster, I'd give us this benefit.
Okay, have you looked at any technologies to do that?
All these things can be kind of discovered through just some conversations.
And I think if I would advocate that to you as a, if you're a CEO, ask your departments
to maybe take an inventory of how they're using the technology systems, where they're
saving files, how they're accessing files, what data they're using, what key systems
they need, and log into on a daily basis, just to get some discovery as to what exactly
are they doing with these things, because it can be very, you know, many people have
used these for now for many, many years, and it's just habitual, again, habitual thing.
People don't think about it, but it's good to get an inventory of it.
That also feeds in and gives you information that's required for that cybersecurity and
that recovery too.
So there's a lot of information, really understanding what your key applications and key information
leads into that discussion as well.
So it'd be very good use of everybody's valuable time to really take inventory of that.
And then you would not only identify and help with recovery and incident response, but you
ultimately can maybe discover ways you can improve.
Yeah, definitely.
Well, thank you.
Thank you so much, Kyle, for joining us today.
Thanks.
If you enjoyed this podcast, like, subscribe.
If you have a topic, reach out to us at info at cIT-net.com or head out to cIT-net.com
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Thanks so much.
Thanks.