269- The Democratization of Technology with Grant Ecker

Speaker 0 | 00:06.420 All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, I'm back in Connecticut, the wonderful state of Connecticut. I don't know how wonderful it is, maybe 15 minutes north of Hartford for anyone that's in love with Hartford. I don't know. I haven't found a lover yet. We are speaking with Grant Ecker, VP, Chief Architect. Founder, executive coach. I could probably use some coaching. I'll take that on the side. We all could. Numerous things I could use. Coaching on chief architect. I just want to start with what that is because it's not a title that if you ask me, what does a chief architect do? I'd be like, well, architect things. A lot of different things. Speaker 1 | 00:52.742 Sounds fancy, right? I mean, we got that going for it. Speaker 0 | 00:55.144 Yeah. What are titles anyways? I used to say I'm head janitor. And that's nothing against janitors because there's just nothing against janitors. I would probably love to be just the, just the janitor, not even the head janitor. Uh, you know, Speaker 1 | 01:08.974 so what is it? Um, yeah, do it really kind of like chief family counselor for the it leadership team, according to the CIO and chief coach for the technical community. So it's really the senior most technologists. Speaker 0 | 01:21.862 You're like the middle child, but you're like the middle child for real. No, Speaker 1 | 01:25.520 I actually am the middle child, so it kind of works for me. Yeah. Speaker 0 | 01:30.083 So chief architect is the middle child underneath CIO? What's the CIO anyways, other than just the person that says, I think we should be visionary with this technology stuff? I mean, you tell me. What's the difference? Speaker 1 | 01:43.473 You know, it depends on the organization. In some cases, it's the cost center manager of IT. In other cases, it's the business enabling. Speaker 0 | 01:52.948 um strategist that takes technology to help achieve those objectives and wow i love it to be the latter but yeah you said like an evil like thing that's the truth which is cost center you're a cost center what do you guys do except cost us money and make everything work in the company and if you weren't around we'd all stab Speaker 1 | 02:14.345 ourselves and say what's going on so digital right that's the one place where we can start to say hey we actually can be a part of transforming the business, right? The digital transformation. It's not just IT, it's a business change enabled by technology. That's changed the conversation. Some of that online retail has changed the conversation. Some of the automated selling is another thing that we've seen shift so that there is actually a little bit of a P&L inside of the IT departments. And I think with AI too, we're starting to see a lot more people leaning into, oh, you guys aren't just plumbers and electricians. There's actually a little bit of interior decorating that the IT folks can bring to the table here. Speaker 0 | 02:56.986 I actually need a plumber and an electrician right now. Really do. I need a drywall guy too. Can we just send a bunch of kids back to become electricians and put a bunch of vans on the street? You're going to do well in life. I promise you. Speaker 1 | 03:10.091 Oh my God. Speaker 0 | 03:11.712 No one wants to work. Speaker 1 | 03:14.313 No one. Including me. Speaker 0 | 03:15.834 That's why. That's the topic of AI and no code, which I think is. I'm really passionate about this no-code thing. You know, I've heard people talk to no-code, low-code. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What is it really? Are we just like duct taping things together? You have any thoughts there? Speaker 1 | 03:28.979 Definitely. I think, you know, honestly, if you're doing something that can be just sort of built like Legos, then do it, right? If the modules exist in a low-code, no-code platform, particularly if you can build it inside of the platform you're already on, like using Salesforce and its embedded low-code, no-code solution. It's a no-brainer, right? If you're already in Salesforce and you want to build an app and they have components you can Lego piece together, why on earth would you custom code that? So those are kind of... Speaker 0 | 03:59.782 Because I like spending lots of money. Speaker 1 | 04:02.364 Oh, let me show you a whole portfolio of things you can waste your time on. Speaker 0 | 04:05.946 To make something that makes me want to, I don't know, either get fired or... I can't use the words that are coming to mind right now because they'd probably be inappropriate. So can you give me an example of that? What is this? this mysterious salesforce no code application environment and are we talking apis to something outside of salesforce wouldn't be an api because we're using no code so i don't know some kind of zap or you can leverage an api so like think about an api that's already existing and Speaker 1 | 04:38.847 the plumbing to hook up to it right so that's a low code no code solution we don't care that behind the scenes something was coded we care that we is the developer of the solution Didn't have to write anything. Right. So. Yeah. Speaker 0 | 04:52.142 We're trying to be lazy. Yeah. Lazy and make it work and work well. And then everyone applaud us and say, thank you. Here's a race. Speaker 1 | 04:59.947 Isn't that what we all want? Speaker 0 | 05:03.536 so the is this is this something that's catching on or has always been around or or is this something that we need to have uh i don't know a discussion around in a group around this and this no code thing is it has it not caught on yet are there are there people out there just you know still spinning their i Speaker 1 | 05:19.603 don't know wheels it it's been around um it's probably got a decade on us um but it's maturing more before it was you had to buy independent solutions and you sort of build the blocks and then others could assemble the block into the solution now there's more libraries available there's more modules available there's more external things you can plug into like apis like you mentioned so i'd say the space is now kind of bordering on mature where it was kind of uh build it yourself and then you can then assemble those pieces later maybe a decade ago i have numerous uh visuals Speaker 0 | 06:00.020 popping into my head right now let me describe them maybe they're hallucinations i don't know they could be might be an ai it could yeah it could be and that literally as you're speaking i saw grain silos right pun intended like a bunch of silos with like you know weird broken wires connecting them you know you know and then they just kind of just disintegrated into one large you silo with a bunch of different applications inside. That was literally the visual going through my mind. Speaker 1 | 06:31.185 I like it. I'll play with the metaphor. So let's take the silos that are filled to various capacities and add little conveyors that are going to moving what's in the conveyors or in the silos between each other. That's kind of how I would think about a low-code, no-code solution as you're dropping conveyors in and moving wheat or whatever from silo to silo. Speaker 0 | 06:54.932 Yeah, but then maybe some, I don't know, evil, I don't know, disgruntled employee or someone snuck into the silo and screwed up a bunch of things. What do we need to talk about security-wise there? Speaker 1 | 07:07.539 Well, that's true of any solution. Hopefully, as each component is designed with security by design, then you can plug these pieces together and it works. It's not like you're building Lego blocks and one of them is made out of Jell-O. Like, yeah, you got a problem there, right? So ideally, as you have each of these components, they're rigid, they're hard. They're, you know, if you got a child, they're duplo size. You can't swallow it and accidentally end up in the hospital, right? So, you know, user level expertise appropriate. That's kind of how I would kind of piece that together. Oh, Speaker 0 | 07:44.337 you brought the users into that. I like how you flowed. I like the flow. This is almost like a. like a zen flow state this is a flow state we just went right into users potentially problematic uh childish users that that play with duplex blocks that's okay we have them we need duplex blocks you know they're like the size of like you know like your hand they're huge you see another yeah of course i have eight kids and two grand oh i'm not gone so yeah you know how many probably permanent scars i have in my feet from stepping on legos i think i stepped on one yeah i did i stepped on one last week it was miserable i remember the shark lego meme it's one of the funniest ones on the internet i haven't seen it but i'm gonna look oh google it this should be we're gonna have to um greg the frenchman i have a behind the scenes uh frenchman running the show uh really the mastermind behind all this he's the he's the if you've ever read rocket fuel there's like these crazy visionary people that's me And then there's the integrator, and he's the guy that really makes everything happen. So that's Greg Liddell, the Frenchman. Everyone can look him up on LinkedIn. So the Frenchman, can we get some kind of cover for this episode of, I don't know, without copyright infringement of Lego bleeding foot somehow? Let's use some kind of AI engine. I can't remember what's the visual one that everyone uses nowadays. Oh, gosh, brain just not working. Let's make that a visual of some kind of Lego cutting into. Speaker 2 | 09:12.176 someone's foot but it it brings in a no code piece and then end users and they're all happy i don't know something like that uh to me at dissecting popular it nerds we expect to win and we expect our it directors to win and one of those areas where we know that we can help you win is internet service providers as an it director tasked with managing internet connectivity few vendor relationships can prove more painfully frustrating than the one with your internet service provider. 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This all starts with a value discovery call where we find out what you have, why you have it, and what's on your roadmap. All you need to do is email internet at popularit.net and say, I want help managing all of my internet garbage. Please make my life easier and we'll get right on it for you. Have a wonderful day. Speaker 0 | 11:42.173 So you have a forum that... We should plug. We should plug on this show. And the reason why is I've had a lot of people, and I'd like to just partner with someone if we can find the right people, but I have a lot of IT leaders, many of them mid-market IT leaders, because they have to do a lot with a little. They typically have, I don't know, 800 end users, souls, people with souls, to 200, maybe 1,000 to 2,000 employees. And they have to do a lot with a little. The ratio of IT staff is about 1 to 100. But just out of curiosity, I'm assuming you have a day job of some sort as well, or some kind of job. What do you find the average IT staff to end user ratio to be? Speaker 1 | 12:28.423 Let's say 1,000-ish to 50,000-ish. Speaker 0 | 12:33.167 Right, but IT staff to, are you saying 1,000 to 50,000? That's the ratio? Speaker 1 | 12:38.392 Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm saying 1 to 50. One IT associate per. Oh, that's pretty good. Speaker 0 | 12:42.835 So that's pretty good. So you're a bar. So you're upmarket where people have more money. I like that. You play in a larger space. Well, that's thus the chief architect role. We have to have another title in between. Speaker 1 | 12:51.465 Well, not the chief architect, right? That's just the whole IT staff of larger multinational companies in the Fortune 200. And I'm counting contract staff as well, right? How many professional IT people does it take to run a multi-billion dollar or billion revenue company? Around that. Speaker 0 | 13:13.469 Hopefully a lot. Hopefully more than they're giving us. That's greater than cost center into the digital revolution stage. So what I find is that there's a lot of lonely IT people out there when they get to the top, a lot of lonely IT leaders. And a lot of them say it gets lonely at the top and they want a forum to interact with. They want to be able to bounce ideas and stuff off of people. I'm assuming that's where you come in. Speaker 1 | 13:41.340 Well, yeah, actually, it's kind of funny. Yeah. for this will probably resonate for a lot of folks in a lot of different fields i mean how many times you get invited to a vendor dinner with the promise of meeting your peer right and you show up and it's a sale right it's like you got tricked you got bamboozled into the timeshare presentation like you can't do that crap oh my god i'm gonna give you a free outboard engine um my dad got my dad got that one you spent five hundred dollars an hour three dollars an hour you got a trip Speaker 0 | 14:10.637 fly down to Florida. We're going to give you a free boat. What? I'm going to get a free boat. It was basically like a, you know, Speaker 2 | 14:17.761 it was a legit boat. Speaker 0 | 14:19.442 It was maybe like a two man raft with a board. And I think a 1.5 horsepower engine that you put on the back. I mean, is that worth flying down to Florida nowadays? Probably not. But anyways, you've gotten bamboozled into a vendor dinner and there was no ears there. But it's like. Speaker 1 | 14:37.269 It's the worst. You're sitting there and you're thinking you're going to meet your peers. They're there, but all the air in the room is sucked out by the vendor conversation. So they structure it such that you're trying to ask a question in a creative way that your peer might notice and you might catch up on your exit from this three-hour dinner, which is a giant sales pitch. So those things, that's just what happens and it doesn't freaking work. So my whole thing is, I don't need you to buy dinner. It's really just not that expensive. And I can find the peers myself. And if we can all build this thing together, we can kind of cut the whole vendor piece of this, the timeshare presentation out. So that's what it is. 220 of my closest friends, chief architects in the Fortune 500 come together quarterly. And we also find topics that resonate and it's just a ton of fun. And honestly, what's great about it is it gets the man in the middle out and it doesn't cost anybody any money, except if we do stuff on the outside, we got to split the check. Speaker 0 | 15:37.541 It's cool. What are the questions that come up? Speaker 1 | 15:41.564 It's super fun. You asked that because right now we're just doing our topic. polls for like what's important to people so governance which is when the cio staff all wants x y and z and then they're building stuff how do we put the reviews in to make sure they're actually getting what they said they want a little more in there because governance is is a governance Speaker 0 | 16:03.101 is a um it's kind of a broad topic so what i just wasn't clear on what on what the ask was there what the question was sure right so that's actually kind of the Speaker 1 | 16:15.191 point. I'm glad you said that because people think, oh, we're going to govern stuff. Okay, well, what do you want to achieve? Do you want to consolidate your application portfolio? Do you want to leverage new tech and drive a competitive advantage with technology? Do you want to support business transformation and digital transformation and enabling a new capability for the organization? Speaker 0 | 16:42.653 Would you say roadmap falls underneath? IT governance. Speaker 1 | 16:46.715 Kind of. I'd call strategy and roadmap like the planning arm. And then as you're going to actually start doing projects, then governance is like, hey, you said you wanted to X and you're actually doing Y. Is that okay? Or do you want to reconsider the design you put forward to make sure what the roadmap was? Speaker 0 | 17:06.561 So you have some checks and balances in there maybe. Speaker 1 | 17:08.882 Yeah. Speaker 0 | 17:09.862 Yeah. No, I mean, you tell me, I want to be clear on this for anyone out there that's listening that has no IT governance whatsoever. Speaker 1 | 17:16.339 Well, that's the, so you put them in. So like, where do you put them in? So you're going to do a check with procurement, make sure that before you go buy something, it's been through the appropriate diligence where these kinds of checks were made, right? So you have the process that allows you to figure out if things are aligned and then you have the control points to sort of make sure that before some money is spent or things are really pushed further down that road, then those checks happen. Otherwise, no one shows up to the toll gate. They just drive around it. Speaker 0 | 17:48.130 Sorry, very ADD here, but a lot of things come up. Again, I have visuals that pop into my head. As companies grow and you have large institutions, and the more bureaucracy, the bureaucracy guy, there's some kind of accent popping out there, the more bureaucracy that comes into play, the slower change. can happen. There's more, the more checks and balances, the slower things happen, the slower business grows. What's, what's the balance there? How do we prevent this governance from just being a real, you know, that's why shadow IT happens. I just got needed now, you know? Speaker 1 | 18:22.153 So for sure, that's spot on. And the way that we avoid that is by embedding the design and the collaboration into that design process so that it isn't everyone sort of builds everything. in hopes like, oh gosh, if I'm coming to the review process and I'm hoping that people accept my design, you missed the point. The architecture review and governance moment should be the most boring meeting of the year, right? Because it's literally- Just be like, Speaker 0 | 18:49.312 passed, checked. Speaker 1 | 18:50.933 We already all talked. We knew this was the design. Oh, did you catch that one thing on the disaster recovery? Let's make sure we plug that in. We catch rounding errors in governance when we have an engaged community. And it doesn't just have to be waterfall either, agile. What's your most significant epics in Sprint? Okay, let's backlog those and make sure that they come through the appropriate design rigor before we actually put them into the actual execution story. Speaker 0 | 19:15.000 Is there an appropriate situation for Waterfall anymore? Where does Waterfall work well? Speaker 1 | 19:19.183 There, you know, it exists. Yes. Like large ERP implementations, right? I mean, there's plenty of things that are just sort of that, like mega conglomerate projects that you've sort of. You know where you're going to end up and it is somewhat kind of blocking and tackling. But I think even in those, you have to be ready to make changes along the way. But sometimes that waterfall structure helps you ensure you've got the rigor and that you do hit what ultimately, you know, you needed at the beginning of the journey, as opposed to iteratively going, well, we'll figure it out next sprint. Like, no, we know we're going to consolidate our our order to cash process and let's go ahead and do the work. Speaker 0 | 20:02.932 I love the group and what you're doing. Can you give us something? Does anything ever come up that's like, dude, that's amazing. That was mind-blowing. Yeah, Speaker 1 | 20:11.181 for sure. I just gave you one of 13 topics. Another one has been, okay, obvious, but AI, right? And it's been so cool because we bring in, we have members that are like the senior people in my role at Microsoft that run the roadmap and the design for the AI products they're selling. And they come in and don't pitch us. They're just saying, here's how this stuff works, which is so cool because we get to ask questions as peers in this space. Speaker 0 | 20:38.864 And then when like the big- Everyone needs a good Microsoft guy anyways. You need a Microsoft guy just to tell you like, hey, here's what you need to worry about from the- from the like the political standpoint going on inside microsoft here's what you need to know about what like dude the security is like actually good now you need to know like hey this is like did you know microsoft's actually like another country with like this weird internal like it it's if you've known people that work there it's it's actually real wild how that company works i i found i actually had a friend i won't name him he got a job at microsoft and they hired him and you know it's this crazy process again add side topic but he got his job at Microsoft. And when he came to work, they actually placed him in the wrong role. Like through like a glitch or something, like he got like a job that like he was like, he's like, this is not what I got hired for. And they're like, no way, really? And like, you know, and we're talking like whatever crazy benefits he had, like $250,000 in stock options every year, plus salary, plus whatever. And like, oh, it's... It's cool, dude. Like just, uh, I'm making up this voice. I don't know really what they said, but this is how this is a voice. Yeah, man. Like, all right. So here's what we want you to do. Like, don't worry about it. Just what we want you to do is just kind of sit in the forum. I don't know what their internal system, probably teams or whatever, like the teams, obviously like teams, you know, they're like, just like go through the different teams groups and get to know people. And we just want you to kind of like find your place here. Like, just take as much time as you want. Until you find where you feel like you can fit. Like what? He said he did that for a whole year. Speaker 1 | 22:22.580 You know, that sounds nuts, but it's totally real. It's actually real, not just in Microsoft and other large companies. Speaker 0 | 22:29.887 Especially coming to these strategy roles. Speaker 1 | 22:31.708 They're like, you don't hire people to tell them what to do with this altitude. You hire people so they can tell you what to do, what's needed, what's important. Speaker 0 | 22:40.216 So he eventually found his home. He eventually found his home and he said, and then, you know, it was like for a whole year, it was just kind of like teams meetings and having conversation, kind of like what we're doing right now, you know, like for a whole year, getting paid to do this. And then he found his spot and then it was like, then he was on a team and they were just, he said, then the workload was, you know, a little different. Yeah. Yeah. You know, but it was, he found a spot. So it was probably like, I guess, fun or something. I don't know. Anywho. We were on mind-blowing topics and things that come up. So what, and AI, just so you know, AI, AI, AI is, is for anyone, I would assume the majority of people, and there's probably a certain age group, and I'm not saying that, not pigeonholing old people. There's plenty of old people out there that know what technology is, but I would say the majority of the people over the age of 70 could give a crap. um about ai i don't even know what it means it's kind of like the cloud like when we were talking about the cloud so when you say ai to you what what's some real niche thing that that came up that was just maybe mind-blowing that you guys were like i gotta implement that i gotta use that like Speaker 1 | 23:55.432 you gotta understand how it is and how it works that's what was so great about this forum and having the direct conversations that people envisioning the product is what was what was amazing is we would understand it then and then we also knew how to protect people and adopting things, like understanding how it's learning. And if employees are using it for confidential pieces of the business and trade secrets, well, you just taught the entire internet the intrinsic benefits of your internal processes or some of the trade secrets and secret sauce to do things. And now it might offer it as a suggestion to the next person who casually uses the system. So figuring out how to keep people safe. And also collaborating on some of the loose edges, like understanding that in the browser, using Edge, there's this little AI button. It looks awesome. You click it, it tells you what's going on in the webpage you're currently manipulating. Well, you're a corporate user and you're logged into that webpage, you're going to assume the little button in the browser is safe. It's like right there in the same browser. Totally not. You just leaked that entire internal document to the internet. So understanding a little bit more about both... how it works as well as some of the user experience threats that can happen is where the value of that conversation is more than just sort of sharing the new widget and the new trick. It's more about, hey, if we're going to put this thing in and we're going to have people using it, this is the things to watch out for. And these are the things that we can actually expect people to really get benefit from, like Teams meetings, getting summarized on the fly with this co-pilot capability, like super cool, very low risk, go for it, like go all in, where some of these other things, watch for A, B, and C. Speaker 0 | 25:45.571 I just had another just vision of... man, I'm coming to meet with my colleagues and it's really just a vendor dinner. That's so funny. Can we use AI to like somehow find out what all the like vendor dinners are and grab all the people that are there? I'm like, don't go, don't go, come to the forum, come to the forum. Um, uh, but bringing up vendors, uh, necessary, um, do you want to call them necessary, evil, usual suspects? Um, um, uh senders it's kind of like how do we deal with these on the right what's the best way okay what's the best way um what's the best way for them to engage you on linkedin hey by the way did you know long paragraph with a link at the bottom is that the best way to engage me man give me that paragraph that's it i want that i can click as fast as you can oh Speaker 1 | 26:39.277 it's like Speaker 0 | 26:41.134 will engage you it's sort of a it's sort of a hollywood right don't call us we'll call you and then it's never going to happen because anyone that needs because go say that to the sales group in your company it's never going to happen because everyone knows nothing happens until someone makes a sale and if you've got a new product out there that no one knows about and they're bootstrapping themselves and they don't have money to like pay the 170 to 180 dollars a click that vonage has and there have been they know they're a better product than vonage or whatever and i actually like vonage nowadays over the old days that's another separate topic but or you know or that they don't know that you know well everyone knows i know where you're going and you're totally right like what are you gonna do like come on that's the thing as a chief architect don't call us we'll call you and Speaker 1 | 27:26.672 your job is to sell to the people that are experts in the space you sell so if you are an sap shop sell to my sap shop and those are the people that i want to be experts in the sap bits and bytes. And then they're going to puzzle piece of solution together that includes this new component. And that's when I want to learn about the component, when they educate the rest of that technical community on how this thing is going to fit into the broader piece. Because I'm not going to be the subject matter expert in any one technology. Speaker 0 | 27:56.526 Let me restate that. So you're saying, if you are, I don't know, an SAP sales rep or something, Oracle dude or whatever, some guy. Okay. You're saying, call my Oracle guy. Speaker 1 | 28:08.673 Call my Oracle guy. Like call the guy who's an expert in that space and convince them it's valuable. If they're, Speaker 2 | 28:15.097 and then I'll come in, Speaker 1 | 28:15.937 then I care. Speaker 0 | 28:17.178 Okay. Interesting. It's just a longer for, for many old school sales organizations, and it's a longer tent in the pole or whatever they're thinking, but it's really not because they're not being effective. And, um, it's just, Speaker 1 | 28:32.347 there are people in my job who want to just make all these large technology decisions. And. If they're great at it, that's cool, but it's super uncommon. I would rather leverage all the intelligence across the domain and have the people that are experts in their space figure out what's super cool in their space and teach the rest of us about it. Speaker 0 | 28:49.960 So you're saying that there's people in your position that just want to make technology decisions and then hand it down to the underlings? Speaker 1 | 28:58.267 I think it's kind of old school. Like it's top down. It's not the way I think our chief architects should lead. I think they should bring the technical community together. elevate the voices of the experts at the right time and sort of broaden the perspective of everyone because there's no way i'm going to be smarter than the guy that spends 40 hours a week in one tech no it's also going to teach and and and grow people and you know bingo everything good everything um the it's Speaker 0 | 29:24.862 classic right because because what's the what's the ultimate worst case of that it's the the the ceo who said that john I can't remember his last name. He said a long time ago, he said, well, you know, the CEO came to me and said, hey, you know, we're migrating to the cloud because I read about it in Time Magazine. So I just met with so-and-so and we decided that we're going with Salesforce off the old CRM. So here it is. We need implemented, you know, second quarter and it's February 28th. Speaker 1 | 29:53.925 Sometimes it works, but those are usually the biggest points of hubris and giant mistake, ego-driven mistake, right? Speaker 0 | 30:00.910 I sold on it. Speaker 1 | 30:02.412 So the rest of this company is going to come along. Now there's some times to make big bets, right? We're not going to iteratively get to a big transformation. So sure, make one or two, right? But check in. You've got this community of experts. Ask the question. Don't just push down an answer. The, Speaker 0 | 30:20.102 so any, um, any major aha moments that you've had, uh, that have come up over the last, I don't know, 12 months. We can't really talk about COVID anymore. That's kind of old, although I guess we should be prepared for some kind of weird thing going on. But, um, I don't know why COVID popped into my mind just because it's so disinformational. Speaker 1 | 30:40.536 I mean, it was huge. We, a few things have impacted us as much as COVID, right? Um, Speaker 0 | 30:47.140 in the technology world, you know, it may just. Speaker 1 | 30:48.922 technology world. That was one of the points we got to be heroes, right? And I think, you know, the things that were like that in the past, cloud, before that, big data, there were moments we thought that we found those things like blockchain. You know, I've seen this hilarious decision tree. Do you need a blockchain? And it was a question, arrow, no. Like that's pretty much the answer, right? Like metaverse. Do you need a metaverse? No, right? But AI is another one. Speaker 0 | 31:16.824 People buying metaverse for like a Speaker 1 | 31:18.366 buying pieces of land in the metaverse like a hundred thousand i forgot about that that was oh my god it's so funny have you seen the homer simpson meme where he's like it's got labeled metaverse expert and then he like falls out into the bushes and then comes back and he's relabeled ai expert like we see a ton of that yeah did the metaverse happen is that gone is that over with like it's not over it just has specific applications and of course you've got people just geek out with this stuff and in second life and it made a whole thing and that's still there but it's just not mainstream now the thing that where there is some some interesting places where this plays is digital twins and some of the things you can do with ar like this idea of not it's not so much metaverse but it's like alternate world stuff where you can sort of scan and x-ray the walls and i'm in a plant floor and know where you have to do service and repair because you have layers that are augmented reality on the phone you like kind of x-ray through walls like that stuff super cool super real and business applicable but like having like a store in a virtual space that people are going to come buy things from and like having to be a big part of your revenue and brand presence yeah no not so much like that that's not a thing yet maybe if we're all wearing apple vision glasses over time that could become something but that's where i really fully engulfed in the matrix yeah i just you know i'm not looking in i still you get covered in goo none of that really works Speaker 0 | 32:47.458 Do you unplug? Speaker 1 | 32:48.638 Do I unplug? No. I should. I don't. Like, I'm trying to get on the airport Wi-Fi on the airplane, right? It's just nuts how much... Speaker 0 | 33:00.326 I do know how that feels, because I did just fly back from Morocco on Friday, and there's just no Wi-Fi in the middle of it. Don't tell me there's satellites up there, people. Like, Speaker 1 | 33:09.092 somebody probably liked my post, and I can't see it. This is awful. Speaker 0 | 33:12.815 Quit lying to me. There's no satellites. They're balloons. Do you ascribe to any conspiracy theories? Speaker 1 | 33:21.335 All of them. Speaker 0 | 33:24.357 No, for real. If it's all of them, then great. I just have a hard time with the lizard people. Although if I really want to buy the lizard, if I read long enough, I'm starting to kind of get a point. But, you know, no, I'm not. Speaker 1 | 33:36.101 There's always something there that you can like kind of scratch your head and go, there's that's interesting. And then there's things that sort of the media has walked away from that. I think are real. It's just not convenient truths. And those are things that probably a lot more there than comfortably accepted by the public. And maybe some of that's okay. Because if we spend all of our time spinning wheels about everything dumb we've done as a people, is that productive? I don't know. Speaker 0 | 34:05.860 Unless they just want you to keep mindlessly working like a drone on the Wi-Fi. Yeah, Speaker 1 | 34:10.203 bread and circuses, right? I mean, there's something to that. Speaker 0 | 34:14.702 It's very interesting how I was just in a country where I was like, everything's a lot cheaper. It's the same stuff. It's actually better, more organic. Speaker 1 | 34:24.187 I was like, Speaker 0 | 34:25.788 things very calm. Things were very calm here. I found a lot of time to do a lot of extra reading and stuff that I don't normally do. Speaker 1 | 34:34.332 The U.S. hasn't gotten the joke yet about the point of life. I think we work more than most other developed countries. Speaker 0 | 34:40.055 Already. Already. Back to back meetings. Let's go, go, go. Roadmap. It's really like an existential shift of sorts. Yeah. I don't know how to describe it. So, thus why the might not be conspiracy theories, the truth might actually matter because, like you said, it might take us back to the purpose of actually living, which brings us to next topic. What is the endgame for you? Is there no endgame? It's just stay plugged in until the battery fizzles out? Speaker 1 | 35:12.028 No. No. We'll see. The journey is the important part. And how many people have I helped along the way? How many people have I been part of their success? The glass buildings we work in, they're great. I love them, all these good things. But it's the people inside that matter. And to me, did I help people on their journey as we were together in whatever time frame we had, whether it was a project, whether it was the employment arc, whatever. And do I collect the great people and keep them with me in the next chapter and the next chapter? And to me, that's... That's what life's about. We do that in our private, personal lives as well. But at work, it's how do we create success together? How do we help each other grow? And yeah, we'll create some amazing business outcomes on the way. But if you look back and people felt good, people appreciated the time that they spent with you, well, that's the damn point. Because we're all going to be dead anyway in 100 years. Speaker 0 | 36:12.876 Definitely. That always blows my mind. 100 years from now, everyone on the face of this earth, with the exception of a very small handful, I think it's 0.004%, will all be dead. Yep. Everyone. Speaker 1 | 36:26.520 And however much money, however many- All of my children. No one cares. Speaker 0 | 36:30.381 Yeah, yeah. All of my children, even my grandchildren, it's just gone. And what handful of those people will still have provided something that continues to give beyond that? So, yeah, clean water would be a good one, Bill. Speaker 1 | 36:49.340 It would be. Yeah, I think we're making that worse than better as a society right now. Like, how do we at least stop that? Speaker 2 | 36:57.825 At Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, we expect to win and we expect our IT directors to win. And one of those areas where we know that we can help you win. is internet service providers. As an IT director tasked with managing internet connectivity, few vendor relationships can prove more painfully frustrating than the one with your internet service provider. The array of challenges seems never-ending, from unreliable uptime and insufficient bandwidth to poor customer service and hidden fees. It's like getting stuck in rush hour traffic. Dealing with ISPs can try one's patience even on the best of days. So... Whether you are managing one location or a hundred locations, our back office support team and vendor partners are the best in the industry. And the best part about this is none of this will ever cost you a dime due to the partnership and the sponsors that we have behind the scenes at Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Let us show you how we can manage away the mediocrity and hit it out of the park. We start by mapping all of the available fiber routes And we use our $1.2 billion in combined customer buying power in massive economy of scale to map all of your locations, to overcome construction fees, to use industry historical data, to encourage providers to compete for the lowest possible pricing, to negotiate the lowest rates guaranteed, and to provide fast response times in hours, not days. And we leverage aggregators and wholesale relationship to ensure you get the best possible pricing available in the marketplace. And. On top of all of this, you get proactive network monitoring and proactive alerts so that you're not left calling 1-800-GO-POUND-SAN to enter in a ticket number and wonder, why is my internet connection down? In short, we are the partner that you have always wanted, who understands your needs, your frustrations, and knows what you need without you having to ask. So we're still human, but we are some of the best, and we aim to win. This all starts with a value discovery call where we find out what you have, why you have it, and what's on your roadmap. All you need to do is email internet at popular it.net and say, I want help managing all of my internet garbage. Please make my life easier and we'll get right on it for you. Have a wonderful day. Speaker 0 | 39:17.886 How did you, how a Doth one build a group of chief architects and get people to come to said group and care because clearly the value, Speaker 1 | 39:30.375 like first time. you have to have a boss that says you can't pay for the forum that you used to be a part of. That's not step one. You need necessity. Speaker 0 | 39:37.478 What do you mean you can't pay for the forum? Say that again. Say that again. Speaker 1 | 39:40.719 So how this forum started, it's kind of a funny story. By the way, it's chiefarchitectforum.org for any chief architect that is out there interested in joining us. Come on in or follow us. We're on LinkedIn. We have a little group where you kind of hear from us. But this whole thing started because I used to be part of this group I paid to be a member of. And then I joined another company and my boss in that company said, I'm not paying for that. I'm like, well, how the hell am I supposed to learn from all my peers to bring really good ideas in? Because, sure, I want to bring all the smart people inside our company together. But sometimes all those people haven't touched the new thing like the next day. So. Where am I going to go learn about that at conferences? Come on, that doesn't work. I got to have some peers to talk to. Speaker 0 | 40:23.283 So I was like- I just love that you said conferences don't work. Hey, can I scan your barcode? Can I scan- They're good. Speaker 2 | 40:32.150 Can I scan your barcode? Speaker 1 | 40:33.431 They're a great place to meet people. But ultimately, you'll get a concept, you'll write it down in your book, right? But do you get to ask a question and then a follow-up question, then a question after that? Like, no, of course you don't. Yeah, that relies on the personal connection. So how do we get more personal connection? And that's basically what... I have a friend out in the Netherlands. His name is Paul Price. He's the CEO of ISA, a nonprofit that is for architects. And I was a chief architect in one of these large companies without the ability to fund the collaboration. So we just said, let's build this thing together. And I took him, my network in the US, he took his out of Europe. We put them all in a room and said, what do you guys want to talk about? And it turns out we had a lot to talk about. Tell me more people want to join us than that. Speaker 0 | 41:17.365 Did you email people? I mean, like how did you get everyone? Speaker 1 | 41:20.606 Um, I do a lot of LinkedIn. Um, that's, that's where I live. I just, I live and breathe LinkedIn. Um, we're all kind of on there. So that was an easy way to sort of network and then sort of build a little private group in there for us to chat and start. Now there's enough of us built a little map of where we are. And there's some of these places we have 10, 20 people. I want to get together for dinner once a quarter. You know, this stuff just kind of naturally and organically started to form. Speaker 0 | 41:45.657 It does. It's like the flat earth form. You know what I mean? Like, if you're into flat earth, you're going to find flat earthers. Real. Speaker 1 | 41:54.299 No, I did find a very amazing meme about flat earth as well. You know, it said, flat earthers coming together across the globe. And I was like, gotcha. Speaker 0 | 42:07.303 Please just fly over the Antarctic. Polar cap and film it, please. Dare you. I dare you. I actually have Flat Earth Dave. Flat Earth Dave, who's like the king. He built the Flat Earth app, by the way. Flat Earth Dave. He's willing to come on the show, but I don't know. I was like, I don't know if I can do that yet. I don't know. Flat Earth Dave, maybe we'll tag you on this post. I need some real genius scientists, though, on for that one. Anywho. Love the forum idea. We're going to plug your forum if you want. And we want people to follow you. Speaker 1 | 42:46.187 It's free. Speaker 0 | 42:47.948 We want your people to listen to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds too. And I would love to have some of your people from the forum if they've got anything really special that they want to share on the show. I'm trying to figure out how to bring the globe. I'm trying to figure out how do we. Technology is so interesting in North America. I think it's a little bit different globally. It's the same, but it's a little bit different. Politics get in the way, the way governments work are different. Um, the way vendors to find a Walmart. Speaker 1 | 43:16.782 Yeah. Everything's different. It's like you get the same products and stuff, but it's like used differently. Like people in Europe, they actually know how to go on vacation. Like we can learn from that. Like things are different elsewhere. It's cool. Speaker 0 | 43:28.505 It is yet also behind some places too. Like some people just can't afford a, uh, uh, an E five license. I'm sorry. There's businesses in other countries that are just not going to pay for an E5 license. Speaker 1 | 43:41.166 And it's neat to see how they innovate and still get the job done, right? And we can learn from that. Speaker 0 | 43:44.848 Still probably using Lotus Notes. I love the Lotus Notes things because I found it because I actually... Speaker 1 | 43:51.112 Make that stuff do anything. Speaker 0 | 43:52.853 I just had a company that was still on Lotus Notes, like a very large manufacturer. A very, very, very large, very large manufacturer. Speaker 1 | 44:03.038 Replacing a Lotus Notes app with .NET. Um, yep. It was a great platform. It was a good product for a reason, but boy, Speaker 0 | 44:10.781 hard to say what it's not. It was for them. It's an is. Speaker 1 | 44:15.842 You know, I was part of this group and they came up with a tagline, which is solving tomorrow's problems with yesterday's technology and no budget. I thought that was so awesome. Speaker 0 | 44:26.986 Please tell me that group. I Speaker 1 | 44:30.107 I'll, I'll protect the guilt that never gets old. Speaker 0 | 44:31.987 That never gets old. That tagline, I've seen that pop up before. Speaker 1 | 44:38.526 We used the Lotus Notes logo as the symbol and the mascot of that team. Speaker 0 | 44:45.610 Solving tomorrow's problems with yesterday's technology. Speaker 1 | 44:48.892 And no budget. Speaker 0 | 44:52.794 I love it. It has been an absolute pleasure having you on Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I don't know what we solved. I don't know. I don't really know. I would love to give you the last word here and say something that would be mind-blowing. So I'm hoping something really good comes out of your mouth right now. Speaker 1 | 45:11.744 I hope so too. Just taking the moment and trying, I'd say, how are you supporting your purpose? You got all this great tech, you got all this connectivity, all these wonderful things that keep us busy, but... When you look up from your phone and look around at the people, are you achieving what you want in terms of how you want to impact them and how you want them to impact you? Speaker 0 | 45:32.838 Probably not, man. I sit in a call center and I just show up to work every day. There you go. Speaker 1 | 45:38.162 Maybe you just need to- Maybe that's what you want, though. Maybe you want to get the hell out of the office so you can go make that difference at home with your kids. That's fine. It doesn't need to be you're doing it wrong. Just have the thought. Have the thought and consider. Am I living the way I want to live? Speaker 0 | 45:54.003 That's a tough question to answer for a lot of people. I think they might know, but they feel stuck. Speaker 1 | 45:59.888 Exactly. It's a small steps, right? What's a little thing I can do today to be more like how I want to show up tomorrow. And then Speaker 0 | 46:06.073 I think just take responsibility for everything that ever happens to you. That's probably one of the best things. I love that. You know, and the second thing would be do what you're really scared to do that you may have never done before. Really step out of your comfort zone. Speaker 1 | 46:20.085 I hate fear. Fear is the weakest thing we can have. It's the thing that makes us not show up at our best, you know, hold back. If you can do anything to root beer out of your life, you're going to be so much happier and be more at your best. Speaker 0 | 46:34.167 It might not necessarily be, it's always going to be there. It might just be, you know, really confronting it and doing it anyways. And the more that you confront the things that you're afraid of, the more easy they become. I just remember like, you know, what's, what are the things that most people are afraid of? Like, I don't know, public speaking or something like that. You know what I mean? Yeah. So just start public speaking. Speaker 1 | 46:52.370 Definitely. Speaker 0 | 46:53.191 And eventually you'll feel, you'll, you'll get some like tricks to the trade and stuff. Like mine is like, I like just like, uh, always making sure rather than everyone looking at you, like you're looking at everyone else and they should be afraid that you're going to call on them. The public speaking, you know, put the table. Speaker 1 | 47:08.257 It's funny. Speaker 0 | 47:08.937 Who in here knows what a, an IP address is. I'm going to call on anyone at random and you better be ready to stand up and know. And I'm going to call on an it director too. What's not port forwarding. Speaker 1 | 47:18.481 I love it. Speaker 0 | 47:20.022 And then all of a sudden I was like, I was looking down and, uh, you know, anyways, who has a technology roadmap in this room? I'm going to pick you at random and I want you to tell me what's on your technology roadmap. Speaker 1 | 47:31.550 There you go. Speaker 0 | 47:33.111 Well, Grant, it has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for being on, uh, dissecting popular IT nerds. Please share this with the global, um, world of everyone that you know, that has been at a vendor dinner. And really all of a sudden realized that, no, been at a dinner to meet with their colleagues. And then that was a vendor dog and pony show. Speaker 1 | 47:54.873 So thanks for having me on. Speaker 0 | 47:57.716 Yes, sir.