390- Don't Be a Tech Nerd w/John Doherty

Phil Howard: We're live. Everybody. Talk with John Doherty, CIO, Columbia Forest Products. welcome to you've been Heard. The you actually have a really cool company that you work for. So talk to me, man. how'd you get started In this technology thing? Like everyone else you went to school for, CIO leadership and technology?

John Doherty: Nope. funny is I went to school for marketing. So I'm a marketing major, and I always had a tech skill. I guess I played with, technology computers growing up. And when I had to choose electives in college, I said, well, that's silly. I'm not going to take an art or music class. What else could I do? So I did take some IT classes So I chose like database management and some classes in computer science. And I was set to be a I thought, oh, I'll be a tech sales guy. And then when I graduated I said, oh, it pays more than entry level sales. Let me just try that. So I did that. And my plan was always to pivot back. And I've been in it for twenty years, progressing down the road.

Phil Howard: It's kind of ironic because I don't think there's many IT guys out there that would be like I was dying to get into sales and it didn't work out for me, so I ended up in it. I think it gives you a good it gives you a different perspective. I think because there's often this kind of dynamic in the. Technology leadership to CEO, CFO world where there's a difficulty in translating complex technology terms into business. And if you've got a sales and marketing background, how do you think that that helps you in speaking to the C-suite?

John Doherty: Yeah, I think it gives you an advantage to understand what is your audience looking for, like what you think about solution selling, right. if you're selling solutions to someone, you need to know what problem you're solving versus just pushing the product or peddling the product. And I think that it gave me that early on of why is this good for whoever I'm asking for money from or resources from, or even translating what your team works on day to day into. Why does it matter to the business? Because a lot of what it does is just it's like the duck, you're paddling quickly underwater, but nobody sees it. But that's important. Like keeping the lights on. It's all the plumbing and electricity of of the business. And I think it's been a unique way to kind of explain what we do and how it translates into value.

Phil Howard: what's your general conversations with the with the C-suite explaining technology and what you guys are doing?

John Doherty: We probably focus more on projects. what's upcoming? What challenges can we help them solve versus kind of what we do every day? So the blocking and tackling is kind of the table stakes. Like they assume we're doing that well. Protecting the company. Doing tickets. Right. It's more about how are we connecting to our strategic plan. so, for example, one of our initiatives right now is customer engagement. And so we're working on a CRM project and kind of linking that to how can we empower our sales teams to more easily track engagements with customers and ultimately measure and improve upon kind of what's not measured today?

Phil Howard: Just curious, what are you guys measuring today?

John Doherty: it's probably more like sales performance. So how are we performing in different segments? Different customer, our customers up or down for the year. What are they buying? How's the mix changing versus what's the industry doing. but I saw in the past my prior company, we did a big CRM project and we had a new sales leader come in. He was from Ingersoll Rand. And, one of the things that he kind of said in his observations was we're count managing. We're going back to the same customers over and over, and we're meeting with them and taking them to dinner and lunch and golf. But we're not talking to prospects. And so we put the CRM in and we shifted focus to growth.

Phil Howard: New business, new business.

John Doherty: And they started new logos. Yeah. And they used the tool to basically say, okay, how much time are we spending on potential new clients versus just servicing what we already had? And it was an interesting shift of using technology to empower that he ended up becoming our president before he moved on to another company.

Phil Howard: When I got into technology, it was at a Cisco startup, we tracked literally everything. I was entry level sales. So I did like I literally did the probably the opposite of what you did, except I fell into it. I wasn't trying to do it. I just wanted to get away from Starbucks. as a creative writing major and a Cisco startup called me because my resume was on monster. We tracked everything, like how many doors you hit a day, how many dials you made, how many like what? What is actually a qualified, prospect, right? We had like, five star opportunities. Like, what's a qualified prospect? Well, do they have a need or all we tracked literally everything opportunities created. And I just remember this one sales manager always saying like don't chase replace and like don't just keep chasing like the same the same thing over and over again. Like replace something with something new. And when you track every metric possible and you look at ratios, you can easily see like like who your haymakers are and really kind of move the needle. That seems like a, like it seems like a basic. So any new VP of sales coming in just, that would notice, like we're not tracking anything or we're not creating new opportunities could move the needle massively, I would think in any company. Did what did revenue look like after you guys started doing that?

John Doherty: well, I can tell you our backlog went from sixty million to over one hundred million and backlogged orders for production. So we grew the backlog dramatically. And then we created the next problem, which was at that company, we needed more capacity. So they ended up building a new factory and focusing more on psyops planning of sales and operations. But yeah, it's kind of interesting. Like once you kind of put a put a process in place and focus on the on the numbers, it just it can take off. Now, I don't know if that really applies to our industry necessarily. Like we're pretty tied to kind of building and construction. So. Mhm.

Phil Howard: Well who do you sell wood to. Yeah.

John Doherty: Cabinet makers, cabinet manufacturing companies that sell to cabinet makers cabinets go into homes.

Phil Howard: So who's not buying wood from you. That should be. And why are they not. And it's like I mean I love this I love that we're having this conversation with, the CTO or CIO. I gotta make sure I get it right, because there is there a difference between CTO and CIO? We've had this. conversation, this philosophical conversation before. and I think if you say CTO, then you could end up with an operations guy, but could also end up with a CIO. So, What fires you up about your. Well, first let's go back to, like you said, like keeping the lights on, maintaining the help desk, the tickets, all this type of stuff. I wanted to ask you, what's a healthy balance? And is there one? And Do we even measure that? Do we measure the time we spend keeping the lights on, and how much time is spent strategic planning and being able as a doing what a CIO should do, which is be very, very well connected with the business and, translating it in the language of business, but actually shoring up the business and helping it, grow, being a business force multiplier, not just a cost center, but what's a healthy balance of. Yeah, we got all these tickets coming in and things are breaking. We're fixing all that. And like ninety percent of our time is spent just like, kind of staying above water. Like what is the balance like? And how do we how do we deal with that?

John Doherty: I don't know the right answer to that, but I feel like it's never in balance. I think it's always pulled to the opposite end of the spectrum, where we're constantly battling too many fires or inwardly focused. Like we need a CRM for ourselves. So how often are we out there engaging with the business and hearing their needs, versus just sitting around looking at a risk register and saying, well, this is the next project we need to fire up? the people kind of looked at me with like, I had three heads, but we are standing up a mil ambassador program in twenty twenty six, and the idea of it is some one manager and it we're going to start small, but you'll assign a mil or a factory to an IT manager and they'll be basically a dedicated business partner through the year. So join staff meetings of that Mil, hear about their challenges, what projects are upcoming, and then connect them back into the IT department to say, hey guys, did you know that they're doing X, Y, Z and you might want to plug into that or that they're struggling with this situation that we know we have a solution to.

Phil Howard: But they're using the app this way, and it was meant to be used this way.

John Doherty: Or they have some other app that they're using because they're not using the app that was intended to be used, um.

Phil Howard: On a 5G network that we don't manage, like how deep can we go?

John Doherty: It's like the same thing with my kit vendors, right? Like I was just getting into it with Microsoft the other day about, I don't feel like we spend enough time together and I'm like, it's not my job to spend time with you. It's your job to be pursuing me and figuring out what I'm working on and how you can connect in with me.

Phil Howard: And so are you saying Microsoft Direct?

John Doherty: Yeah. Microsoft Direct. Yeah.

Phil Howard: Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's why they're I think that that's why they're moving. They're making the EA strategic changes that they are making because they know that a customer account managers at Microsoft, whatever you want to call them sales engineers, solution engineers at Microsoft, unless you're, like, high up and really getting paid a lot and you get your quarter of a million to five hundred thousand stock options every year that are vesting or coming towards vest every year at twenty five percent, most likely that role. And you tell me how often you're. What do we want to call them. Customer account manager. The average lifespan that we've seen is three to eight months rotation. So how often is that person changed for you at Microsoft?

John Doherty: Well, I've only been in this role for thirteen months, but I've had two teams, so they changed once already.

Phil Howard: Okay. So eight times two is sixteen and I did I made it through first grade. so. I mean yeah, it's like that's why they're moving it towards allowing their MSPs and CSPs to, renew, sell, take advantage of the EA program because they know that someone that owns a business and is more niche is going to take care of the customer better and they're still going to get what they want, which is, global domination. and selling of licenses.

John Doherty: Yeah, it's definitely a different model. Right? I grew up in the app side of it. So I worked with Oracle a lot. SAP those companies didn't have this partner led methodology where, hey, you want to buy our software? Better go talk to a partner. I'm talking more maybe in the applications space. Right. So for like dynamics, I did a dynamics project in my last company. And it's like Microsoft is very hands off in that regard of oh yeah, go ahead, work with our partners. Now we have a fast track program to make sure you don't shoot yourself in the foot, and you can't go live without evidencing some things, which is admirable, but I feel like in the past, Oracle, for example, was way more engaged in your implementation or involved with it that I'd.

Phil Howard: Seen all they do, it's all they do. Though Microsoft does so much more. I think that that's the issue.

John Doherty: Mhm.

Phil Howard: Or I mean I guess a striking difference at least between. Yeah SAP Oracle dynamics. Like are these arguably the top three. Right. So you could go to SAP and in Oracle and probably get a similar experience and go to Microsoft. And it's a no. we're not going to you're not going to get that ERP. Ah I was talking about this earlier with my team. That's very, very you either have a job or you don't at the end of the implementation. Yeah. Which has been famously said on this show many times, so I don't think we answered the question, though. What is the right balance? Is it fifty percent of it is maintaining and keeping things running? Is it forty percent? is it None. We outsource it all. What's the best model?

John Doherty: I go sixty forty. I think if you could get it down to sixty percent of your time, is keeping the lights on, doing maintenance and upgrades and maintaining, and you had forty percent of your department's time to focus on value in the business. That'd be a pretty good balance in my mind. I guess it also depends how big your team is, right? You could staff up and you could have a set of people doing one hundred percent behind the scenes work and a set of people just completely outward facing.

Phil Howard: What about learning and development? Yeah. How do you keep your team, like ahead of the curve or how do you yourself take time to I don't know, in the in the vastness of AI hype scale and security breaches, what should we be doing? Like is there any best practices to staying abreast? I would hope that your doctor, is staying ahead of the doctor stuff. We would, hope that our IT guys are staying ahead of it as well. What's the what do you guys do for learning and development? Staying ahead of the curve.

John Doherty: I mean, we do a pretty good job here. So everyone's encouraged to do one or two different conferences or educational opportunities per year. either go like our PMO manager went to a PMI, Institute event in Phoenix for a week. just popped into a Gartner event in Philly a few weeks ago focused around AI. It was like, what? I need to go hear what other leaders are talking about and struggling with or, you know, what's upcoming.

Phil Howard: I'm curious about that AI event in the Gartner event because I have my, stereotypes. how much of that event was actual real IT leaders speaking about AI use cases and how much of it was kind of like a hype marketing thing. Just curious. It could be.

John Doherty: Mostly real in my mind. I mean, it was like real, real speak of what have we done or where do we struggle? I think that was the more interesting part. It was more transparent on where they've struggled.

Phil Howard: Okay.

John Doherty: either struggled with getting buy in from the business to put guardrails around it, or struggling to to partner with the business to enable it, because it's kind of a runaway train. So I thought in that regard it was pretty good. it's not like Gartner Symposium, it's Gartner. It used to be avant. It's Gartner community's C-suite community. So it really is just people talking about their experiences.

Phil Howard: Okay, great. So, AI guardrails or actually getting the C-suite to buy into what was the second one, again, to partner with the technology.

John Doherty: How do you get how do you bring like security into it was maybe focused a bit on security. There's a bunch of CISOs talking about it, but like we can't stop people from exploring with AI, nor do we want to. Right. We we support innovation in our roles. But how do you bring controls around it? So we're innovating in a secure way. We're not giving away data. We're not putting ourselves at risk down the road. When something goes from proof of concept to full scale. And it was like, interesting to hear different people's perspectives on.

Phil Howard: What was the number one idea that came out of it.

John Doherty: I think it was just more like, you gotta already have a strong relationship with the business. If you don't have that, you're doomed. Right. It's like you can't show up and no one's ever heard of you, Phil, and say, okay, I'm Phil and I'm here from security, and I want to know what you're doing with your proof of concept to make it more secure. They're like, yeah, you're here from corporate and you're here to help.

Phil Howard: Okay, moving on to questions. what do most CIOs get wrong that you think is obvious?

John Doherty: I think focusing too much on the tech side of it, like building the perfect tech stack or rationalizing applications to have fewer brand names. Okay, not listening exactly to what the business needs you to focus on and just focusing on kind of your playbook.

Phil Howard: So when you say the tech stack and brand names, are you talking just like, hey, we just need to unify or simplify? Is that what you're saying?

John Doherty: Yeah. Or like we're going all cloud. Well, like, why does the business want you to go all cloud? Do you have needs to be elastic. Do you have some strategy to get off of on prem data centers? Are you focused on your carbon footprint or something like a Microsoft is fully offset? Like what's the reason you're doing what you're doing? because I think ultimately at some point when the costs get out of control or the effort gets too high, people will challenge it and say, well, we didn't ask. We didn't necessarily ask for you to go all cloud. We didn't know it was going to cost us this much more money. so I've seen that just like, we're going to rationalize all of our systems down to this ERP package. Well why. Because it'll be easier to maintain. Okay. But is it going to support your business better.

Phil Howard: Well so that is clearly a disconnect between it and the in the C level leadership. How do we I guess how do we connect, discover respond or like what would be some of your like if you had a. Playbook for creating real business outcomes. What steps would be involved?

John Doherty: I think Sturko so some type of cross-functional steering committee where the business sits with it, with an equal voice to say, what are we going to work on? How are we going to prioritize? Where are we going to spend our money? PMO or steering.

Phil Howard: Committee? Okay. Yep. Go ahead.

John Doherty: Committee. Decide what to work on and where to invest. A project management office to do portfolio management. So you can look at those things coming in and say, what are the next? What's the next priority? And making sure that you're executing those well and.

Phil Howard: In alignment with the step one, which was the steering committee. so the PMO is in alignment with the steering committee I get it. Okay. Yep.

John Doherty: And I think.

Phil Howard: It doesn't come it doesn't come PMO first and then steering committee. It's got to come. Steering committee first.

John Doherty: Steering committee first of what's coming in PMO to say hey, this is what it's going to take to implement or execute. And I think PMO you got to have a real benefits realization component, which is what we're working on here. So you did the project, you went live. Did you get the value that you were supposed to get? Yes or no? And if not, don't just walk away from the project and say, oh, we put in the app. You got to make sure that you're getting the return of why you turned on the app.

Phil Howard: okay.

John Doherty: Or did said project.

Phil Howard: Steering committee project management outcomes? Yeah. reality check. What do we want to call reality check? The first two sound real technical and like real agile type stuff. You know what I mean? But like, like, number three is like, okay, like, are we just checking the box? In other words, are we just checking the box like, project done. It was kind of like mission accomplished, but not really. In other words, what about all the add ons? What about the like? A lot of times people I remember in the past like, oh, we finished the ERP project, but all the bolt ons aren't done. It's not delivering what it needs to be. It's not, fully implemented this type of thing. It almost sounds like it's two different things because the reality check and the did we deliver, it almost sounds like it's two different things. I don't know, you tell me, because the reality check could be like, hey, we need this done in six months. And you're thinking in your head, I don't know if we can do it. Well, how do you deal with unrealistic expectations? Say yes and do it.

John Doherty: No. Definitely not. I was just talking to someone about this the other day. Like I'm more of the style of even for my own team. Like, tell me what you need to be successful and when you can be successful, and then I'll hold you to that versus giving someone unrealistic, realistic expectations and then saying, okay, well, you missed it, but I'm happy because you got it done in four months. But I would have given you six. I think you just gotta that's not even push back. It's just explain what are the risks or likelihood of failing if you focus on kind of that type of approach. If we need it done in three months. Well, what are you trying to get done? You just want the thing turned on, or do you actually want to get the value from it? It's like change management, right? I've been exploring change management with Prosci in my last company in here, and it's like they focus on business outcomes, not project milestones, especially for ERP. You can put the ERP live, but if no one knows how to use it, what's the point? Are your customers going to be better served? Are you going to make more money? No, you're going to go backwards. You're going to have new software, but you're going to go backwards in performance. So I think it's again, just going back to the value. What are you trying to achieve. Why is the timeline so important.

Phil Howard: And then I always like the trying to overcome the okay. So well first of all why do you need it so fast as well. It might be just speed to market. And speed does matter in the business world. I do believe speed matters a lot. but quality does as well. So it is always an opportunity. And this is just something that I don't think this is after three hundred and eighty shows, we never came up with this like solution. It's just kind of been coming up as of lately, maybe due to the different things that we're asking of it leaders. but when they're given a what seems like an unrealistic timeline. Thinking about, well, if we were the Michael Phelps of it. Like what? Like what would it take? Like, what if we could do it right? And it's an opportunity when it is asked to do ridiculous things. What happens all the time? In order for us to kind of like bridge this gap because it really shouldn't be an us versus them type of mentality, which is what we're trying to fix here on You've Been Heard. It's an opportunity to be heard by the C-suite and say, we can do this, but it's going to require four extra headcount and this much more money. Would you like to do that, or would you prefer to take a little bit longer?

John Doherty: Yeah, I think that's I was just in a session the other day and PwC was talking and they were talking about assumption based planning. So assume you can achieve the goal and you have two choices. You have steering actions or curving actions. I think they call them, which are things you can do to make the assumption come true. So that would be like adding the four headcount, hiring a third party to do the work for you to make it go faster. And then you have corrective actions, which are when the assumption doesn't come true. What actions can you take to still succeed? Which is, hey, we can delay the project, create a longer timeline. because I was when I built my PMO here, my number one thing was I don't want it to be PMO. No, it should be. Yes, but yes, we can do that. But we're going to need these things to change. Either a reshuffle of priorities, additional monies to bring in third party support, you name it. There should always be a way forward, even if it doesn't look like there is one.

Phil Howard: Yes, but.

John Doherty: Your point right is you can go fast. I ran an ERP project when I was at Wesco, and I had a probably a hundred people, and we built an entire front end on top of this ERP platform, and it was like impossible. And we went live in six months. It was never heard of. Our CIO at the time was like, this should be in Harvard business case as Mission Impossible. That came true. And if you would have told me at the beginning like it was going to happen, I would have probably not believed you, even though I was kind of leading it. But the reality was, it was like we had so much horsepower. I've never seen that much manpower, like the amount of people developing and working on the project. You could move so far in five days, which was just an efficient machine we had onshore and offshore. It was like we were working around the clock. Even when we went live, we would do ten, eleven o'clock calls at night for issue resolution, and you'd wake up the next day and things were fixed and the business was like, this is phenomenal. Like we've never seen such turnaround.

Phil Howard: What was the key to that? Was it, what was the leadership kind of that turned the key there? Because it sounds like that would take some serious prioritization and organization.

John Doherty: Yeah.

Phil Howard: Like what was what was the tool? Was it like a whiteboard of problems? Was it a slack group? Was it what was the what was it.

John Doherty: We're using JIRA for software development. So it was agile software development, but it was also that this was the number one priority for the entire IT department. And so it got when I needed something from the team or the legacy ERP team, or the bi team or the infrastructure team, it always bumped to the top. so that was a big unlock as far as moving because you never had to wait.

Phil Howard: How did you choose who was head of what part and communication and all of that?

John Doherty: I mean, of different parts of the project or.

Phil Howard: Yeah, I'm just I'm just trying, you know, I'm just thinking of a of a large project like this and getting it done in six months and all the things that can go wrong.

John Doherty: Yeah. So we had like weekly, I forget what we called the meetings, but every IT manager would come to the meeting because every IT manager ultimately had some type of sub project of the program.

Phil Howard: Right.

John Doherty: To give status reports, ask, say what they needed.

Phil Howard: Right.

John Doherty: we would provide answers or support where needed.

Phil Howard: Did we tweak two week sprints or anything like that or. I'm just like, I'm just.

John Doherty: Yeah, we were doing two week sprints. We were doing, kind of six week project plans on a page to show people where we're headed. We took an interesting approach to ERP that I've never seen, which was like agile, like we went into test cycles not having the solution fully baked, which I've never done before or again. But so we enter into like a conference room pilot, knowing only thirty percent of the solution worked. But by Friday we'll be at fifty percent, and by next week we'll be at seventy. And by the end of the CRP, we should be where we need it to be. And so we would kind of structure our test cases and what we were doing based on what was ready, which was unique. typically it's more waterfall in those types of projects where, okay, everyone says they're green and ready to go. Boom. We enter the test event and then you spend three weeks testing. And so I think that helped us shape.

Phil Howard: So like building as you go, kind of like a build as you go, which makes sense because it's then you've got real live feedback from, I guess, people using it.

John Doherty: Yeah.

Phil Howard: What's the biggest challenge in it right now? Like, if you could fix one big challenge? I'm just saying kind of maybe across the industry or if you could fix one big challenge in IT leadership tomorrow, what would it be?

John Doherty: I think staying abreast with emerging technology, I think your comment earlier on training, like there's so much changing out there with AI is kind of the buzz right now. data platforms where the buzz a few years ago, cloud was the one before that. It's how do you stay current with what's going on while you're trying to keep up with everything going on in your team and what your business needs from you. I think that that's difficult.

Phil Howard: I think it's like sandboxing I think helps a lot. I just know us playing with AI made it a reality. Like what we thought AI was and could do was not the reality until we played with it and applied it to different aspects of the business. And we're like, okay, well, why don't we? Clearly it's not going to do this. It's not going to write articles because they sound lame and it's just cheesy and you can spot those type of things a mile away. But where else can we use it from a process standpoint? And then I just think the AI coding is I think where it's going to go. I think so many dev guys are going to be just we I was talking with Greg, my AI I mastermind this morning that produces the show and puts all of our systems together and is kind of like our, systems integrator guy. And he was just saying, like the new people coding with AI think differently than the actual dev people. And he's like, I know, because a lot of my friends are like hardcore old school dev guys, and I see them using AI, trying to force it to think the way they think, and it's pigeonholing them and holding them back a little bit. Whereas I, you know, use it this way and have it connected. I mean, just like it's like, to how he works with GitHub and coding and everything, it's just it's different than the way a developer grew up. And what we've been able to produce is, I mean, like real live working CRMs and apps and like in a weekend, things that would you'd pay someone half a million dollars over six months to build. That's my thought on AI.

John Doherty: But yeah, and I think even for me, I don't write code, but I do budgets and PowerPoints and I tell stories. And the way you used to do it is you'd open up a PowerPoint and you'd start racking your brain. Okay, let me put together what the story I'm trying to tell. Let me build it out. Now you just copilot and say, based on everything I've been doing around this subject area, highlight themes and different things. So it's almost giving you these blocks. It's like Legos, and then you're putting them together and it's so much faster. And I feel like that could translate into code too, where in the past it's like it needs to be written in this perfect flow and this perfect structured way. And it's like, or you throw it at AI and it gives you some chunks of code, and then you stitch it together and you're done way faster.

Phil Howard: find the glitches and problems. I think it takes the right mindset back to your three or four steps, whatever we're going to map out here first. Right. Which is like steering committee first, like, what are we trying to accomplish? What's the challenge? what's the problem we're trying to solve? Right. then AI is very good at helping you put together like and decipher and put together different steps. By the way, the RFP writers in the world gone, like, just gone. Like the hundreds of government workers that just sat to write RFPs. It's like unbelievable. What what what I can do an RFP with weighting scales and like, into a spreadsheet like that's that's amazing. But if you don't have the methodology, if you don't know the methodology, if you don't know, like you're not coming from that world, then you can't drive it. You have to have a good driver. so what's your prediction eighteen months from now that everyone in it is going to be talking about that people ignore today?

John Doherty: I think AI might be one. So I think there'll be components of it that we don't do anymore or are automated through AI.

Phil Howard: What's one that like people might not be thinking about? Like what action of it are people not? It's going to just be like, yeah, guys, you need to learn something because this area of it is going to be gone.

John Doherty: I think infrastructure will be fully automated through AI. I mean, infrastructure deployments, resizing of machines. I mean, we're probably almost already there with infrastructure as code. But if you can get AI on top of that to predict where you need to go, I feel like that's going to become basically cloud infrastructure. That is right. It's going to become AI managed. I think we already see that in the security tooling, right? AI can do incident response and automatically isolate things and do different things. So I think that'll be an evolution coming of resizing the machines, spinning up machines. You could just have an agent and say, hey, I'm going to need a test box and I need it for this long. This is what I need it to do. And it'll just.

Phil Howard: Wow. You could take it a step further. Yeah. It could just be, like, really optimized for each individual end user. Like desktop design for individual end users, like fully optimized for that person.

John Doherty: Or just think about the link between your infrastructure monitoring solution and actually your infrastructure. Right? You're running out of disk space or this machine is having some latency issue, like it could just automatically respond and just tell you what it did.

Phil Howard: yeah. Or even give you like an approval, like a red light, like approve or not approve. Yeah.

John Doherty: That's probably a place it'll go, I suppose. I bet there's more. Maybe we're not focusing on it or the industry's not the manufacturers, because there's probably more money in the business side.

Phil Howard: That's actually really great prediction. That's a great prediction I love it. Is there something that. you would say most IT leaders strongly disagree with. Let me give you an example of what most IT leaders agree with. I would say that most IT leaders agree that you have to be curious. What would you say most IT leaders actually strongly disagree with and have some kind of like common stereotype of what they disagree with.

John Doherty: I would say that it is not part of the business. I think every IT leader I've ever met has had the same comment of like, why is it that we say there's the business and then there's it, are we not? Is it not part of the business? So I I'd probably tell you nine out of ten IT leaders would probably say we disagree with the fact that we're called it and lumped into some separate function versus a component of the business. And I think the further you go, you can't run a business nowadays without it. So it's kind of interesting. It's how it's titled that way. But at the end of the day, if it stops working, your business is probably shut down.

Phil Howard: Hollywood and TV always ruins these things for everybody. They don't help out like the IT crowd and stuff like that. Like never.

John Doherty: I always get told like you're on a normal IT person. Like, what does that mean? I'm a business person that leads it.

Phil Howard: We must break the mold. It's like every salesperson's like a, like a like a sleazebag, like sales slick liar or something like that. No, they're not a solution provider. They're not trying to, help you find the solution to a problem and, actually be a solution provider. No. it's we have these, like, stereotypes that run throughout, like, the industry. The CEO is a, typically a high stress individual that speaks in sports metaphors. or it's a high powered woman that watches CNN before she goes to work in the morning. There's all these stereotypes across the industry. So, okay, so if it's not part of the business, what other are there any other entities that are not part of the business? I'm just curious, are there any other departments that are not part of the business?

John Doherty: I think sometimes you hear about finance or HR. It's really the three back office functions that sometimes get lumped into that. if you asked me, I'm like, well, you can't run your business without high performing organization. And HR is the way that you ensure that or drive that. You also can't run a successful business without finance. it's more than just counting coins at the end of the month, right? It's financial planning. Forecasting.

Phil Howard: it's weird that it has to, like, you can sometimes get. I've had guys on the show before. They're both the CIO and head of HR.

John Doherty: Ironically, yeah, I think the IT leader, eighty four lumber, has HR under his hat.

Phil Howard: So. that's actually a best practice. That's that's kind of damaging. Damaging how? Because it has such a massive effect on the bottom line and efficiency or growing the business. I mean, I think it's obvious, right?

John Doherty: Yeah, I would say in some regards it knows more holistically of how the business runs than any other function. When I, when I was at Wesco, there was one female leader there that we worked with quite a bit, and we had a separate finance system and a separate ERP system. And she was the benefit of having these things run on the same system, like why would I want that. And like I was shocked. I was like what.

Phil Howard: And you said.

John Doherty: Because there's a big gap between when you're trying to troubleshoot a financial issue or research something. Getting back to the operational side of why it was why it happened. And I'm like, you're going to link the whole thing together and you can draw your accountants or your cost. Accountants could draw all the way down to the transactions and quicker find out what went wrong or what's driving what you see. In the financial reporting side. I'm like, it was so obvious to me. I'm like, well, what? And I said, well, I don't forget what question I asked. But it came out that she hadn't been to an operational location in a long time, like a very long time years.

Phil Howard: So her response to your enlightenment was.

John Doherty: Like, oh, I didn't think of it that way, or I didn't have that perception or perspective of how that would benefit the organization. And I was like, blown away. And I just you learned that right as you go. Not everyone understands how their function impacts other functions. So you think about like you put sales orders in, well, how does that impact operations? Well, they have to do supply chain planning. They have to get all the materials. They got to figure out how much machine time they have. When can the order get out? There's a lot of complexities that happen after you book the order, and I've seen that on all various ERP projects I've been on, because you usually put all the teams in one room and you start solutioning and people always come back and say, wow, I didn't know it was that complicated. And you're like, yeah.

Phil Howard: Wow.

John Doherty: Or even like, right, how does payables work? Well, payables. They don't pay the invoice unless the material's been received, unless the Po price matches the AP price and all these different things that, not everyone's fully aware of the the connections between different functions, purchasing and finance.

Phil Howard: And so how do we translate that? I guess so the question is what's the most important idea you wish every IT executive would understand about modern IT? You already answered it. But how do we put that into. Hey, you need to know this.

John Doherty: Yeah. How does it deliver? The business, I guess is what I would say. If you don't understand how your systems are delivering or helping the business execute, then you're missing the point of why you're there.

Phil Howard: Because that example is beautiful. It's like, why do we need all these systems unified? I mean, they're all working. And they can't see the. It's like, you don't know what you don't know. You can't see what you can't see. Right? And you're like, well, for example, I would be able to provide you insight into this. So I'm pretty sure every great business leader loves reporting and loves to see trends and would love to know more trends and where they can fill the gaps or increase arrows pointing upwards in a positive manner.

John Doherty: Yeah, I think at the pace of the world changing, you need processes and systems that can scale and keep you consistent. That's kind of where I think the strength of the modern IT call whatever you want modern. They talk about modern finance or modern whatever, but to me you need the systems that put the guardrails on the process where historically what I've seen is you have people that are experts in the process, but nowadays people don't stay in jobs for twenty years. So you can't have the hero mentality of, well, this person's just the expert in how we do all of our material scheduling. It's like, wouldn't you rather just click a button and the system tells you what to buy, when to buy, and when it needs to be here. And that way when you have a turnover or something happens, it just goes. I flew back a few weeks ago on an airplane with this guy that works for Eaton, and he's in charge of their data center division or something. I was like, you must be. And he's like, yeah, we've like tripled in size in eight months. That type of growth is only possible through, I think, scalable processes and scalable systems.

Phil Howard: Scalability. Massive. I mean you Nailed it. How? Because a lot of people will say like, no, its job is just to deliver the kind of like how we do it to the business, right? Like the business is, in charge of like, the leadership and the strategy and all that. And it needs to be well connected with the business and need to understand all that, because it's the best people to know how to deliver to the business. But you just mentioned scalability, and you have I mean, you're like, I was going to be in marketing and sales and that's, but I'm in it. How can is there like a thought process? Is there, like you said, a steering committee at the beginning? Is there something prior to steering committee, like a discovery process or a research process that would help understand better how to scale faster, safer, richer?

John Doherty: I don't know if it's necessarily scale. But my prior company, we used to talk about being going from order takers to order makers. Right, right. And it's like, how do you get to the point where the initial problem has been identified and people are sitting around a conference room, not IT people, business people talking about how we're going to solve this problem. That's where you need to get invited to, because if you get invited to that, by the time it gets to the steer co, whatever they're asking for, you've already influenced the solution. So it's going to be a good idea. It's going to be the right solution that fits in with whatever technology strategy you have or whatever your capabilities of delivering are versus someone shows up and says, we need to implement SAP to solve this problem. And you're like, well, what's your problem? What problem are you trying to solve? Oh, we have that capability in our current tool set so we could implement this module and solve your problem. I think that's kind of where you need to get to is you got to get all the way to where the the problems are happening and get invited to the discussion. And I say, get invited, not me. Get the IT department needs to be invited to that and it needs to.

Phil Howard: It needs to get heard, they need to be heard.

John Doherty: And it needs to be a regular thing of like when you have a performance issue with an individual, who do you call you don't you don't call your boss usually call HR. And so I think that's where when you have a problem, it needs to become natural, where it's like, hey, we need it in the room. We're talking about this because they'll have a good perspective to add to how we might be able to solve this with a tool we already have, or something they've seen at another location or at another business they've worked in. I think that's the trick.

Phil Howard: So what's the message we need to deliver then to the world? what's that message that we need to deliver to the world that they need to hear? Is it a common quote or saying like, what is that? What is it?

John Doherty: What is it? I mean, what makes a good business partner? I think that's true of any Any kind of function. It's someone that helps solve, understands your problems, and can solve your problems. Like you need to be building your IT teams and leadership to be good business partners. They speak the language, they can understand your problem, and they can connect you with the solution or recommend something.

Phil Howard: That's it. Say that again. I can do what, what and what.

John Doherty: I think it can be better business partners by understanding your customer's needs.

Phil Howard: Yeah.

John Doherty: Helping them find solutions or recommending solutions that you've already seen or you know about.

Phil Howard: Let's try this right now. We're gonna try this right now. I'm just going to let you know our biggest problem. I don't know what our biggest problem is. It's not our biggest problem. We want to scale to two podcasts a day. Like that's our main goal. Like that's the scaling thing. Okay, fine. We got this other we got this other problem which is helping IT leaders get heard. We want sea levels. To hear this podcast, we want IT leaders to be heard. So we've been on LinkedIn forever. What is the. And we wrack our brains like, daily. Is it headcount? Is it a automation engine? It is a social media like app. What is it? Is it partners? Is it real live people sharing the show? Is it all of the old guests that have been on the show sharing their show? What is the best way to attack and. Solve the problem of the podcast being heard across all social media platforms. When we have only been on LinkedIn, what's the best way? Because there's so many ways. There's like, well, we could do YouTube shorts and we could tag them, right? And then we could share them with this. Or my solution was, why don't we just ask? Why don't we just ask everyone that's been on the show to share the show?

John Doherty: I think that works. I think the other one is real believers.

Phil Howard: Real believers, real people.

John Doherty: That's a push. So if you can get a pool people okay. Desire for your show, I think that's it. Right. So I did a talk a few years ago at a CIO conference about building your brand. And the best time to build your brand is not when you need it. And by the way, if you're only networking, networking with CEOs or CIOs, you're a CIO. Who's your next boss? It's not a CIO. It's either a CFO or a CEO. So you need to get into their head. So I think an interesting way to do it would be to get some CEOs and CFOs on here that have it under them and say, hey, give us your perspective on what makes a good it, or what do they need to do to be heard? Because then all of a sudden your audience is like, well, no, I want to be heard. And now I'm hearing from my bosses type of role of what they want to see emulated in a CIO. To be a successful leader, to be heard. To me, you do that and then people are tuning in because they want to learn something that they don't already know.

Phil Howard: Agreed.

John Doherty: So I think that's a good way to do it.

Phil Howard: One hundred percent. One hundred percent. But if it's just in a vacuum and it's not out there on social media being spread everywhere. Yeah. What else do we do other than just ask people to share the show and throw it up on LinkedIn? And, hope is not a strategy. so I'm just throwing that out there for anyone listening right now, if you have this amazing idea as a technology leader and you want to be like, Phil, do this and I'll do it for you. I'm totally willing to let you do that. John Doherty, you've been heard. It's been it's been a pleasure. any, final thoughts? Or if there was one message that you wanted to deliver out to the world into the C-suite, what would that be?

John Doherty: well, first, thanks for having me. I think maybe for my it peers out there. Don't be a tech nerd. Find how to be a business person. Meet your peers where they're at. Speak their language, and you're going to make a lot easier and you're going to break the stereotype on it that we're just a bunch of techies.

Phil Howard: Love it. All right, that's it man. have a wonderful day.

John Doherty: All right, man. See ya.

Phil Howard: Yeah. Talk to you soon.

John Doherty: Bye.