414- The Complexity of Simplicity w/Antonio Marin

Mike Kelley: Well, welcome back to another. You've been heard. Today we've got Antonio Marin who is joining us and joining a new organization. So Antonio, I know that you have been involved in talking to many a C-suite, and you don't like to talk about the technology. You want to talk about something besides technology. So do me a favor, introduce yourself and let us know what you like to talk about.

Antonio Marin: First of all, Mike, thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be part of your podcast and to reach all your listeners. So thank you so much for the opportunity. you're right. as a CIO and I will learn in my career, not only as a the CIO, but even since I was in helpdesk, technology is something that we do It's a tool in our toolbox. But in reality, what we're doing in an organization is business outcomes. Right? So when I talk to C-suite members, I love to enter their world. If I'm talking to the CFO, I want to hear everything about what finance has to do operations, logistics, procurement, and everything in supply chain. Because the more I know about what they do and how they do it, and we can have that conversation in a level that they feel very comfortable with. First of all, creates a lot of ideas. If we start talking about new things, it's like, okay, Have you thought about this? And the next part of it is I can come up with a technology. Technology should be my problem to solve, not their problem. I'm providing a service. My information technology is a service organization, and I need to provide that service to them. in the finance world, in the supply chain world, they could care less what system you're using. What if you're using robotic process automation if you're using a genetic AI? Obviously, there are some buzzwords out there that they hear all the time. They're bombarded by media on all these things. But what they really care about is, is this really going to help me in my business?

Mike Kelley: So how often are people still coming to you? Or how quickly do you get them to change from that mindset of coming to you and saying, I need something that does this to, Hey, I've got this problem, or I'm looking for this solution. Can you help me achieve that? Because that for me, that's where I found the real meat on the bone, so to speak, of, asking them why. what's the goal? What are we trying to do here? Because as soon as I understand that, then I can start grabbing the different tools out of the toolbox and have that different conversation with them.

Antonio Marin: Unfortunately, it's an eighty twenty. And let me explain why eighty, twenty, eighty percent of the time they come to you and say, I need this. The reason is because they talk to somebody in a sales position in a company or they saw a commercial and they look all the beautiful things that technology can do for them. And they've installed into that conversation. Twenty percent is like, can you help me with this? But again, and I'll go into more detail on that, but in reality, I flip it around. I always flip it around. Tell me what you're trying to accomplish. Let me help you out. What do you hear? what are the pain points that you have in your business process? What are the goals? What are the audience that you're trying to reach? And let me hear what you heard so I can help you.

Mike Kelley: Okay,

Antonio Marin: and let me tell you why. And this is what I think. It happens and I still see it in maybe in the large corporations, you don't see as much as you see in the medium smaller organizations where it has been. It keeps the lights on it. It's more geared to help those us infrastructure. And it always reports about. Well, all my sites were up ninety nine point nine percent of the time or we did this in cybersecurity or we put this software in cybersecurity and we save you one hundred million dollars because we're not hacked this month. that conversation doesn't resonate with a C-suite member. It doesn't resonate with a business owner. So I try to turn around like, tell me what you're trying to accomplish. Let's look at if that technology that you heard about really makes sense within the infrastructure, within the goals that we have, not only for your department, for the whole organization and let's build that roadmap together.

Mike Kelley: I really like the approach and you've added some flavors to the way because like I was stating, when I have that same kind of conversation with the leaders within the organization, it's typically, well, tell me what your goal is. And you're asking, okay, well, tell me what you've heard. Tell me what, audience you're trying to reach. And I think those are some critical questions and components to that conversation.

Antonio Marin: Right. You mentioned that transition to a new job, but I spent four years in my previous organization and we're talking about data lakes. And data lakes are great for some things. They're not so great for others. When I was in the in other organizations, I've been several jobs in my career. I probably followed the traditional path of CIO of three to four years in an organization. But the thing about it is, one of the challenges I had, especially in the oil and gas, is that I would have the CFO looking at the ERP reports, which are real time, and then they look at their metrics and their dashboards. And that came from the data lake. And it didn't matter how many times you explained, well, the data lake refreshes every four hours. When you're dealing with massive amounts of data, it is impossible in a data lake to have everything up to the second.

Mike Kelley: Right? Yeah. You have to be very selective of what's real time, what's near real time and what is batch refreshed.

Antonio Marin: So when I went into WCA waste, which is one of my other previous companies, I promised my CEO and my CFO that I was going to make new mistakes.

Mike Kelley: I like that.

Antonio Marin: So we found a technology that created their visualization. With data visualization, we were able to pull the data from the source system, from the ERP, from the outside HR system, from the accounts payable system, from the operational system, virtually in real time. So my dashboards were always the same data that I had in my, source of truth system. And that helped tremendously eliminate that curve. And it was a tremendous success. We didn't have that lag time. What the CFO saw in one system he saw in the dashboard. There was no discussion. As a CIO, I can tell you it was the most relaxing time I had because I had to deal with that noise.

Mike Kelley: So what mistakes did you make?

Antonio Marin: Always make new mistakes. I mean, you always try things that don't work. Sometimes you try things that are too aggressive. Sometimes misjudge the culture of the organization in terms of change management. You think there are in a ready state that they're not? you misjudge some political things sometimes.

Mike Kelley: Well, I was particularly interested in the, data lakes and, the things that you like, you mentioned at one point that it's not always the best solution for everything. so many people right now, data is king. Data is the source for all of your AI stuff, your ML stuff, and for these analytics that everybody's using to optimize the business or to run the business, what's the downside that you've run across inside of the data links

Antonio Marin: To me, the downsizing. There were two areas timing, which I think is okay. The other one was, in the ETL extract, transform and loading of the data. All the business rules that you have to build and make it even more complex. So maintaining that complexity was incredibly hard and incredibly intensive. So with data virtualization, we're limited those things. The other thing that happens, which is extremely expensive in data lakes, is when you want to add another dimension. Once you start adding another dimension, you have to go through the whole process of looking at your cube and how the new dimension is going to affect everything that is connected. When you're dealing with data virtualization, you're dealing with virtual cubes, so it doesn't matter. You can add or take away modify and it's super flexible. But again, I get it. There's some companies that have some technology that I get it. Some companies are willing to live with a refresh and they feel comfortable with how the reports come out. I totally get it.

Mike Kelley: Right.

Antonio Marin: in my world, if I want to be. In a way aggressive with data. I want to make sure that I fix it in one place and it's fixed across the whole domain, then I'd rather do data visualization and maintain my source of truth as the source of truth. Once you start moving things from point A to point B, then you're dealing with other things. So it is tricky, but it's not one size fits all and it's not. One solution will fix all your problems. I've been in organizations where data virtualization is not the thing. They just don't feel comfortable with it.

Mike Kelley: Yeah, I was going to say data virtualization if I remember correctly, it's a fairly new concept. It's something that's only been out there for three to five years.

Antonio Marin: Actually longer than that.

Mike Kelley: Longer than that. Okay. Yes, in in practice, but go ahead.

Antonio Marin: No, it was a funny story. I found this company that had this data visualization tool, and I fell in love with the concept. creating an agile ETL with bringing all the data. So I was trying to explain this to the C-suite and I showed the difference of the master data management. And I built this blue line with ones and zeros. And I had all my different applications connected to the blue line. I said, we can unplug this and plug this in and do all these kind of things. And this was in twenty sixteen. Okay. Twenty sixteen.

Mike Kelley: Yeah, a decade ago.

Antonio Marin: The chief operating officer told me, Antonio, I don't get it in the technology, but I love the blue line. So we call.

Mike Kelley: It the zeros.

Antonio Marin: I just want the blue line. So we call it Project Blue Line, which is actually a project that later on was honored with IDG, as one of the IDG digital age fifty awards for the advancement in technology. It was phenomenal experience. It was amazing to see how many sources of data we combined, and it will fix it in one place and fix it to the other. it helped us create this, kind of entry point into the organization. So when we acquire new businesses, we could actually transfer from the.

Mike Kelley: From those source systems.

Antonio Marin: From the source system into our system. And one of the major successes we had, we bought a waste management company in the Kentucky area with twenty four locations. We converted them from the old company to my company, WCA waste over a weekend. It's one of the fastest acquisitions we ever done.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. Was that the one that you mentioned in LinkedIn being done within one hundred and twenty days or you were done? No, no no no no, that.

Antonio Marin: Was.

Mike Kelley: With you said a weekend.

Antonio Marin: Yeah. No. In USM we acquire freedom, Medical International.

Mike Kelley: That's right.

Antonio Marin: And, they did two things. They did the, movable medical equipment, same as USM. And they have, the beds section, which was completely different. We were able to follow the same concept. Now, there was a lot of data cleanup on both sides of the equation, to be honest with you. But we were able to convert the freedom medical movable medical equipment to our data within thirty days.

Mike Kelley: Okay.

Antonio Marin: that meant when you talk about technology, they didn't care about the technology. What they care on the business outcome is that we can continue renting medical equipment. We have control over the inventory. Right? Right. And most importantly, the hospitals are dependent on us were not affected by the acquisition. We had to make some adjustments to our system because bets are rented like packages. Basically, like when you go to McDonald's, you order the burger, the fries and the coke.

Mike Kelley: Right.

Antonio Marin: Here. You order the, bed with the mattress with the, they have some blowers because their mattresses. That's a package. So we had to make adjustments to the software. That's what took us the longest. But within one hundred and twenty days of acquiring the company, we're all already one single company.

Mike Kelley: And so you brought them into the ERP or the equivalent of an ERP within the. Acquiring company. Yeah. Yes. Okay. And that was funny. Different systems, completely different systems.

Antonio Marin: Both companies have their own homegrown systems. So it was completely different, completely data sets. Everything was different.

Mike Kelley: Oh man. And without the change that engine while in flight.

Antonio Marin: but the key thing here is to come to a level of abstraction that is higher than the details of the process. At the end of the day, you're renting equipment, which means you have some inventory that you're going to place in a customer area, and then you're going to get it back. A lot of people get lost in the noise of this is a bad or this a ventilator or this is a defribillator. Now you're moving a piece from point A to point B and coming back to point A. And once you're able to break that complexity into simplicity, beautiful things can happen.

Mike Kelley: Okay. what lessons around that breaking of the complexity because, my mind instantly spins off. Oh, well, I'm going to need something that helps me manage the attributes and the condition and these kinds of things because when I rent it to you, and if something happens to it while it's under your control, well, when I bring it back, I'm going to want to make sure to recoup or to be able to reset so that it's ready for the next customer.

Antonio Marin: But it's nothing different than we were doing before just because I bet it's not different from mme, aside from the movable medical equipment where.

Mike Kelley: The defibrillator and.

Antonio Marin: Yeah, it doesn't matter. You take a picture, the thing is broken. It goes back to the biomed team. They look at the repair and say, hey, this is broken. We send an invoice to the customer to say it broke during your rental.

Mike Kelley: Okay.

Antonio Marin: but the most important thing to me, when you break complexity into simplicity, it comes all the way from my helpdesk days. I started my career at the helpdesk. I got my degree in computer. Got my degree in computer science. Couldn't find a job as software engineer. Started as a help desk. And I think that was a defining moment in my career because I had to learn to listen to what the problem was. So working for USME, we had another. You mentioned awards and my boss used to make fun of, me because, oh, you guys got another award and it's true. We were very blessed with a phenomenal team that listened to all my craziness and they went along with it. And fortunately for us, the market and the customers went with it as well. So I was walking around Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and talking to one of the head clinicians, she said, Antonio, I just want to order equipment with one click. I don't want to have to call anybody. I don't want to have to go into a portal. I'm on my day in my EMR system. I just want to click order and that's it. And I came back from Baltimore, back to Houston, and I got my team. We're in a three hour call and we're like, okay, team, we need to figure this out. And through conversation, we said, okay, what are the technologies that are used in the hospital? We talk about APIs, we talk about files. We talk about emails, we talk about faxes. It's like, well, one of the most common things that are used in hospitals are faxes. It's HIPAA compliant, secure, HIPAA compliant. So it's like, what can we do with Efax? So we combine it with robotic process automation, machine learning and AI and create a tool called Meconnect. And from the hospital side, it's extremely complicated to pass all the cybersecurity rules, all the complexity of hospitals, the complexity of the EMR system. I mean, if you try to integrate through an API, it's a very long and expensive project. Configuring the EMR to send a fax somewhere else. It's a matter of a couple of days. They do it all the time because they have labs and they have X-ray, third party X-ray companies. They do all the time and they are very good at it. So we created this system where we actually receive an efax, and we created an amazing relationship with our hospital partners that use the system to the point where nurses love it because it's one click. They just go wherever the patient is. They go to the screen, they click on the order. we received the order. Our AI and machine learning understands the form puts your into our system and goes directly to the branch that is going to deliver the equipment. And I call it the complexity of simplicity. the only thing we talk about to the hospitals is. Can you send me any facts? Here's a number. Here's what I need you to send me. The training of the model behind the scenes, all that kind of stuff that happened through my team's efforts, which, by the way, once we had the model learning, it was very simple. I mean, for a new efforts to be learned, it takes about fifteen, twenty tries. For

Mike Kelley: Each of the different forms or for just all forms for a customer.

Antonio Marin: For each form, for the order and the pickups. It's takes about fifteen tries because we have so many of this, and obviously we can influence the way that they can send their effects. We can tell them, if you send me these, the machine learning already recognizes fields. So.

Mike Kelley: Um, so you can have them include the data points that you have to have.

Antonio Marin: But it's very simple.

Mike Kelley: Learn from there. Yeah.

Antonio Marin: And you know, the day for them is very simple. So you create stickiness with your customer. You create customer loyalty. You create service, satisfaction.

Mike Kelley: Yeah, yeah. Because now they're just hitting that one button like you talked about.

Antonio Marin: Exactly.

Mike Kelley: Simple, quick and easy.

Antonio Marin: Quick, easy. Getting it out of the way. We don't have to involve large amount of people. It's not costly. And it was a tremendous success actually that was the twenty twenty four CIO one hundred project.

Mike Kelley: Okay. Yeah. I was going to ask you, out of all of the awards that you've won, which one are you most proud of?

Antonio Marin: Well every award is different and every award means something different because they are team awards.

Mike Kelley: Right?

Antonio Marin: So when the first one was the IDG fifty.

Mike Kelley: Okay.

Antonio Marin: Is the year that IDG just gave it to fifty companies all over the country, all the applications being one of fifteen and small company with small budget meant a lot to my team. The first Orbi was, and I know they talked CIO of the year, all kind of stuff. Your cannot be CEO of the year. You don't have a team of the year. It's really a team effort.

Mike Kelley: That's yeah.

Antonio Marin: I mean we're nothing without our teams.

Mike Kelley: Right? Yeah, I have lost a majority of my programming skills. All of the skills that we picked up when we were on the help desk have gone away because of the skills I've learned as a manager and as a supervisor and as a team lead, as a mentor.

Antonio Marin: So I know that he meant a lot to them. And to me, that's a satisfaction that I get out of it. So when I joined USME, the team was divided into two areas infrastructure and software development.

Mike Kelley: Okay.

Antonio Marin: So I got the team and say, guys, what we're going to do, we're going to work as one single unit. There's no es, there's no it, it's information technology. We're all in the same boat. What you do affects here. What you do here affects there. And we're all together. And I was very fortunate that they, believe and they embraced the idea of working as a team. And I told them I actually took the Orbi to the office and I said, one day we're gonna have one of ours.

Mike Kelley: Nice.

Antonio Marin: Well, we have a person, my team, my director of IT infrastructure. Being in the healthcare business, cybersecurity is extremely important. So he took the flag and carried the flag to the finish line. We became Soc2 certified within a year. He put an amazing cybersecurity project together and he was named twenty twenty four CISO of the year.

Mike Kelley: Okay. That was the CISO award that you had.

Antonio Marin: Right?

Mike Kelley: Or that the team had. I mean, let me correct that the team had.

Antonio Marin: The cyber security. But then in twenty twenty five, we repeat it with a CIO award, which was combined with the CIO one hundred for a project we did for improving the business processes in the supply chain team. That really saved the company a lot of money. So what the cool thing about it is that once you teach someone to win, it becomes the norm. If they start fighting for it.

Mike Kelley: Okay, I was curious how often you were applying for these awards and how often somebody else was applying for you or for the team for these awards.

Antonio Marin: Well, on the CIO one hundred, I had to apply because it's very detailed and what it goes.

Mike Kelley: Okay.

Antonio Marin: The, CISO and the CIO always come from the outside.

Mike Kelley: Okay. And I noticed that you're part of a or a member of a CIO group in in Houston.

Antonio Marin: Several actually.

Mike Kelley: Several. Okay. So you're leveraging the communities and you're talking to your peers. What do you well, what do you learn from those interactions?

Antonio Marin: A lot. Well, there's so many things. What we learn from the interactions is what's going on in different organizations. And one thing that I'm very passionate about with my team is that I tell them all the time that I want them to test the market. Listen to the other companies being interviewed, get their skills up to be marketable.

Mike Kelley: Right?

Antonio Marin: What I want them to say because they love the company.

Mike Kelley: There you go.

Antonio Marin: One thing that I learned in my career is that grass is not always greener on the other side. And what I love is that when they talk to organizations, if they're talking to somebody from a larger organization, they learn that large organizations tend to be more conducive of blocking people into smaller areas of knowledge.

Mike Kelley: Okay. I've seen that.

Antonio Marin: In a medium size organizations, you get to learn more technologies. You need to go across different angles. You need to be involved in other things. You have more contact with the C-suite. You have more contact with the field at the same time.

Mike Kelley: Right? Yeah. You have to wear multiple hats to achieve multiple goals because you're a smaller team

Antonio Marin: Yeah, I had the chance to interview people who tell me, well, I'm a storage specialist. Well, in a smaller organization, storage specialists, it's probably ten percent of what somebody does because they're doing Network. Firewalls. Storage.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. So server management? Yeah.

Antonio Marin: You name.

Mike Kelley: It. The routing. Yeah. All of the wiring.

Antonio Marin: And I love when my team members come back to me and say, hey, Antonio, I talked to this person from this other company and he's like, we really enjoy what we do here. We're learning a lot of things here. And to me, it is very satisfying to hear those things.

Mike Kelley: Mhm.

Antonio Marin: So I love them doing that kind of stuff. And the other thing from my perspective, I heard loud and clear what Steve Jobs said one time. He said, like, I hire people to tell me what to do, not to tell them what to do. And normally I'm sure you've been in companies where they hire you and you come with ideas and they tell you, no, no, we've got it covered. You just do what we tell you. It's like you hire me because I have a level of expertise. Let me show you what I can do.

Mike Kelley: Yeah, yeah, let me help. Versus. Okay. Yeah. Those are never fun jobs when you just come in and and okay, here's your box. Stay inside your box.

Antonio Marin: and then as leaders, as managers, we as the employee get out of the box. Well, we're putting them in the box and we're telling them to get out of the box.

Mike Kelley: I wonder how many times in your career you've had to deal with the IT groups being multiple groups instead of a single cohesive unit?

Antonio Marin: Many times more than I want, more than I wish. But at the same time, and I'm going to say in the old days, but it still happens every now and then, somewhere across many industries. Some companies don't see IT as a leading force in the business. Companies see IT as a necessary evil.

Mike Kelley: Right?

Antonio Marin: one of the things that I always argue is that because in our industry, in our profession, we haven't been able to set a level of communication tools that are universally accepted by C-suites. I try to compare the CIO to the CFO.

Mike Kelley: Okay.

Antonio Marin: A CFO will always have the PNL, the balance sheet, or they have their four major reports and every CEO is familiar with those reports.

Mike Kelley: Right?

Antonio Marin: If you go through different levels of organizations in IT, what do we report? It depends a lot on the experience of the CIO. If there's a CIO, if you have a very technical person, what they're going to be reporting on is like, network ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of the time, CPU utilization. A CEO doesn't care about the CPU utilization or the network uptime unless it's affecting the operations.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. Unless it's a constraint on another part of the organization.

Antonio Marin: To say that you have Three hundred or five thousand tickets a month and you solve four thousand five hundred. Doesn't mean anything. What is really important is what are the holes in terms of knowledge in the organization. What are the failures at the application level? What are the needs of the organization that are transferring to tickets? That's a different conversation.

Mike Kelley: Okay. Yeah, completely different conversation. and now I can start to see why you've been heard. Because when you have that conversation versus the number of tickets resolved and first call resolution, like you said, they, don't care about that. But when they recognize that because of the constraints of the hardware, this has generated this many calls and we've slowed operations down by this amount. When we added new hardware in or with that purchase that you approved last month, we have now reduced the number of tickets and operations is running at a higher velocity. So they're able to do this compared to the hey, we saw a reduction in the number of tickets.

Antonio Marin: Yeah. one of the other things I think we lost through time. like I told you, I have a software engineering background computer science degree and I had to go through a very painful classical algorithms. And an algorithm, they teach you to measure the efficiency of the code that you write. When I worked at my first job at Bechtel, I went from helpdesk to software engineering. I had two computers on my desk. I had my software development computer, and I had the worst computer on the field.

Mike Kelley: Okay.

Antonio Marin: So I tested my software on the worst computer in the field because that's how the engineers were going to see what's going on. Because this thing about like my computer is slow. Is it because bad network, bad hardware or bad coding? And through the years, we've been throwing more hardware to bad code. To true So to me, it's very important that when we put something out there, whatever we put is going to be super efficient for the field. To be proactive. If it takes me five minutes to run a process. What happens if I can turn that process in from five minutes to two minutes? Can we visit more customers? Can we process more orders?

Mike Kelley: Yes.

Antonio Marin: So you see, where I'm going here is like, we're not talking about technology anymore. We're talking about a business outcome that I need to fix through certain areas of technology, which is my responsibility. But the business outcome is also my responsibility. And if I can help operations, if I can help sales, if I can help marketing, if I can help HR with that. Then I'm doing my job.

Mike Kelley: So how do you deal with the age old, push and pull or role conflict that we run into as technology? We bring a technology. So, we've had the conversation with the operations team. We understand their business goal. what they need, we bring them a solution, a technology that will achieve that goal and it doesn't get implemented well or it doesn't get adopted well. It's more about the adoption versus the implementation. or you got any advice for us and those that are following us? well, in that arena.

Antonio Marin: Well, it's like I mentioned on the mistakes in the past. Yeah. Misjudging the readiness of the organization. there are different areas where we can certainly, and I can certainly improve all the time. that's a never ending story, but you have to continue improving and learning. And every company is different. Every environment is different. Every industry, every profession is different. So you need to adjust your plans to the organization you're dealing with. So one of the things that I learned is communicate often.

Mike Kelley: Big one, you, if you're not communicating, you're not being heard.

Antonio Marin: Now, we're not trying to solve a technology problem. We're trying to solve a business problem. So why are we excluding the business owner from the decision itself? We shouldn't.

Mike Kelley: Right?

Antonio Marin: That's a partnership. If they're not one hundred percent vested on that, it's a failure. I also like to include, I created this group in WCA waste, and I've been bringing this type of group in my organization since that moment. And you're going to love the initials of the team because it's called the Business Enterprise Solution Team.

Mike Kelley: Best solutions team.

Antonio Marin: So I try to get people from the oppression side, from the business side to be who are very savvy in technology to be part of that group, because then I can marry their knowledge of what happens on with feet on the ground, with what happens in technology. So we create this group of subject matter experts who number one, they come from the business areas and understand what's going on. They speak the language. They are respected by those departments, but they're now in it. So we can leverage the relationships. We can leverage their knowledge to provide solutions not only that matter, but that they are adopted and also adapted to their needs.

Mike Kelley: Okay. This is such an important piece of my experience, of what I've learned over the years to that everything that you're just talking about right now is, so key to, being heard and to, advancing within the organization and helping the organization advance. Because when you do this, the technologies, adapted, adopted, and then leveraged to change those business outcomes.

Antonio Marin: And the other part of it is that when the other thing that also helps tremendously is in IT, And something I love about IT, I love about my career through the years is that we're not a silo organization. We're not a vertical organization. We're a horizontal organization.

Mike Kelley: Yeah, we talk to everybody.

Antonio Marin: If I hear that oppression is doing something, there's going to affect HR, onboarding or offboarding, I'll bring the HR person. So I start trying to link people together. My job as a CIO is to bring people together. We tie it all together with technology. Yes we do. But at the end of the day, it's how you bring people together.

Mike Kelley: Any wisdom that you want to impart there or that you can share on, other ways of doing that? Or is it just knowing the people in your organization and saying, hey, I heard something that I think you need to be involved in. come listen in on this conversation.

Antonio Marin: Well, I believe it has to do with personality. It has to do a little bit with culture. If you fit in the culture of the organization, your personality fits in. The culture is way easier than when you're just like robotic or you try to solve the problem with technology. Say you need to use this and it's going to solve your problems now. I mean, you need to get to know the person. you need to know from a personal, professional level what's going on there. And you mentioned that I participate with different groups in Houston, right? That's called networking.

Mike Kelley: Yeah.

Antonio Marin: Well, that's external networking. But what about your internal networking? you have to network with your team members, right?

Mike Kelley: And everybody, everybody, there's, I think.

Antonio Marin: there's a book that says never eat alone.

Mike Kelley: Okay.

Antonio Marin: Which is about married alone. Just have the opportunity always to meet with someone. Here. Eating with someone is the example. But really, it's about never be alone.

Mike Kelley: Yeah.

Antonio Marin: Build that connection. And sometimes you won't be able to build a connection with a person. we're human beings and we're not going to be everybody's favorite. And but there may be somebody in your team that can build that relationship.

Mike Kelley: Okay.

Antonio Marin: And that's important. That's what my business enterprise support team and solutions team is so important because they come from that business area where they can help. So if I cannot build a relationship, somebody else can.

Mike Kelley: So with the best team. how often it to me, it seems like you're bringing in the business people for a specific project and then kind of releasing them back out and I'm inferring from the conversation and you said that you bring them into it.

Antonio Marin: You bring them to it and they become subject matter experts. You train on the technologies. But they're great for a subject matter experts. They're great for training. They can try to find the right conversation type for certain areas of the company. It's very complex. You can build a manual, very generic manual or you can build a training video. But if that doesn't resonate with the person who is doing the job, learns, it doesn't matter. As an example, I can go to Ikea, buy a piece of furniture, and you give me instructions on how to put the thing together. That's not the way to communicate with me.

Mike Kelley: Okay.

Antonio Marin: so finding those lines are very important. And the only way you can find those lines is by getting to know the person.

Mike Kelley: Right? By never eating alone.

Antonio Marin: And if you can break those walls, if you cannot turn those walls down. In some cases, you have to rethink if you're in the right organization.

Mike Kelley: Or you have to find the right individuals that can break those walls down and hopefully have that communication for you and, have them be on your team. Yeah.

Antonio Marin: Right. that's why I was saying like, from a team perspective, you can break those walls. It's like, well, if I'm doing all these, I'm trying to help and I'm still not able to help, then there's a bigger problem.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. It sounds like, if you don't fit in the culture.

Antonio Marin: It's one of the most important things.

Mike Kelley: So then how do you hire for culture? What do you do as a technology leader to help make sure that the people that you're bringing into your group and into the organization through your avenues? what are you doing for that culture piece of this? What are you looking for?

Antonio Marin: I have many stories about my career that we could spend weeks here, but something I learned in my career, you know, as an employee and things that happened to me, I I don't want them to happen to somebody else. So I'm brutally honest when I'm interviewing people. I mean, I don't want them to accept the job that doesn't exist. I tell them everything that goes in what's going on, what the good, the bad and the ugly. When I offer somebody a job, when you go to HR and HR says, well, they need to be middle of the scale, I will give them every penny that I can give them because I don't want money to be an issue. If money is not a question, then we can concentrate on the IT operations, on the results, on the business. If somebody comes to me and said, I just want more money after I've done all that, that's not a person I would like to hire Because it doesn't matter if I'm giving you everything I can. And you still not satisfied with that? Then you need to look for some place that will satisfy that need.

Mike Kelley: Yeah.

Antonio Marin: Now, if we take that money situation out of the question now do you really believe in our mission? If you believe in our mission, I can teach you technology. I can send you to training, I can coach you. I can do everything else. If you have that attitude, if you have that vision, if you share the vision, if you share the passion. Money is not an issue. What's stopping you from being successful?

Mike Kelley: What are some other examples of the the hard truth that you've had to give? When looking to onboard somebody or when.

Antonio Marin: When interviewing well, Humility. I love asking a question to people who think they know everything, because if I say something that I learned in my career in it is that you will never know everything.

Mike Kelley: Yeah, that's way too broad.

Antonio Marin: It is too broad. So, you're going to laugh with the question that I asked, but I want to. Humility is one of them. I also, I tell them about the organization. Like I said, if we're struggling with infrastructure, we're struggling with some. I tell them where we're struggling because I want to hear their opinion. I want to hear if they have that the little light and that fire inside them that says, we can do this, or I know I can help you. That attitude that can do attitude is incredible. And the third part of it is I explain to them my philosophy of it is it is not a job, it's a way of life. When you are in it, What is your favorite movie? the ones that have technology, the things that I was watching Tron, the new version of Tron the other day, I'm like, that code's really terrible. You can tell I was not a programmer who wrote it down. So but then because you're an IT and technology changes and AI is a perfect example. We have these conversations about AI five years ago now. Everyone needs to become an expert in prompt engineering and expert on how to train learning models. All those things happen if you don't do it as a hobby. If you don't enjoy tinkering around with technology, if it's not part of your hobby and what you do, you can become really miserable in it.

Mike Kelley: Yeah.

Antonio Marin: So I see as a way of life. But back to humility. My first question to you is a two part question. The first question is how familiar are you with windows? I can tell you that a very high percentage would tell me they are a ten. I know everything about windows, so if they say anything below ten nine, I may still ask a question. Eight. Seven six. We're good because I know they know their limitations. I know they know they need to learn and they admit that. But when they tell me ten I asked a very simple question why do we have to reboot computers when we install new software? If you understand that question and you can answer that question. You understand the architecture of how a computer works. If you understand how a computer works, you can troubleshoot and you can solve the problem. I've been interviewing people for more than twenty years. No one has answered that question at the interview level.

Mike Kelley: I'd ask you, but I don't want to give away your answer to, your future hires.

Antonio Marin: It has to do with computer architecture. it has to do with a processor.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. and clearing out the cache and getting everything level set and ready to go.

Antonio Marin: Fresh register management. Memory Register management. Yes.

Mike Kelley: Yeah.

Antonio Marin: So if you understand that, you understand how computers behave and you understand why we tell people to reboot the computer, so the problem will go away, but that doesn't solve the problem. Understand how it happens though.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. It just helps clear the field so that now it reduces the number of errors.

Antonio Marin: But if you can explain why we have to reboot the computer when we install software, you understand what you need to understand in terms. And I believe that, you know, windows ten out of ten.

Mike Kelley: My computer's been sitting here for a day and a half telling me it's time to reboot. And I'm like, no, not yet. Oh, man. So ironic?

Antonio Marin: Back to the complexity of simplicity.

Mike Kelley: Yeah, the complexity of simplicity. I promised you that I was going to ask you a question and we're running out of time. So here's my question. So make a prediction eighteen months from now, what will everyone in it be talking about?

Antonio Marin: I think if I may do it in a multi-part answer.

Mike Kelley: Of course.

Antonio Marin: The first thing I think everybody's going to be talking about is, did we achieve the return on investment on AI that we promised the board? The second part of that will be. Is this really a bubble or a true technology that we can implement at all levels of every company? And the third one in large organizations will be, how can we defend ourselves from these small companies that are using AI better than anybody else?

Mike Kelley: Those are some good predictions. I like those, I like those. And, you know what? I was thinking to myself, wow, this is one of the first interviews I've done in a little while where we haven't just been talking about AI the whole time. touched on pieces of it, but yeah, all of those are relevant, so relevant.

Antonio Marin: I think the potential is amazing. We have seen amazing results so far. I think that one of the biggest challenges with AI right now is that AI is a vast field. And what's dominating the conversation right now is generative AI.

Mike Kelley: Right?

Antonio Marin: But there's machine learning, there's deep learning and there's computer vision. There's so many forms of AI that in IT, if we try to use one size fits all with AI, we are going to fail.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. And so many. I don't know if we're having enough of these conversations with business because the business is talking to us. AI and just AI, and they're not a majority of the people I'm talking to don't know the difference between the four different models that you just talked about, five different models you talked about.

Antonio Marin: But that's where we start a conversation, right? It's full circle here. Is that what happens when they come to you and they hear this way, okay, what do you hear? Why are you trying to achieve?

Mike Kelley: And who's your audience? And I like that part.

Antonio Marin: Do you see that? It is funny because in essence, it's not about the technology. It's about the people, how we manage with the people that we work with, and we bring the right solutions for it to match their needs or exceed their expectations.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. Antonio, I could continue to talk to you for another hour at least. I mean, this has been a very engaging conversation. I hope our audience has been enjoying it and has gotten as much out of it as I have. I know you're now invited into our community, at you've been heard. Please participate and I encourage everybody that's out there listening to us join in and join the conversation so that we can talk about more of these things and have these conversations. Antonio, is there anything that you wanted to promote?

Antonio Marin: Well, first of all, it's been a true honor and pleasure to be with you. I can't believe we talked for about an hour and it went like super fast. If I was anything that I want to promote is let's not forget about the people, teams, not just having your team coming to work every day, but challenging every day with new and better things. So their skills are always up to par with market, build an environment where they feel comfortable. They love coming to work because at the end of the day, technology is technology. Technology is going to be there. We're in a people's business, and I think that message needs to resonate across all the organizations. And hopefully with your audience, we can build a common language for C-suites so we can start creating a conversation from it to the world.

Mike Kelley: Yeah, because I think that was another thing that you mentioned. And we kind of zipped right through it and right past it. CFO is always coming with this conversation and these assets for their conversation. What's it doing and where we're touching on so many parts of the organization, we need to have that common language. so that we can be heard.

Antonio Marin: Exactly. And you don't get a seat at the table, you earn a seat at the table. And we want to earn it. And we want to make sure that we create a path for the next generation of CIOs.

Mike Kelley: Yeah.

Antonio Marin: So they don't have to go through the things that we went through.

Mike Kelley: Oh, man. Yeah. I noticed that a lot of our, timelines, line up and we had to self mentor. I mean, especially in the beginning, there weren't that many people that had blazed the trails in front of us.

Antonio Marin: that's why networking is important.

Mike Kelley: Yep. Yeah. Because talking to your peers, learning from your peers, learning from my peers has been one of the best things for me. It gave me more of the affirmation that I got from anywhere else too, because I, would be talking to my peers and find out, hey, I've already solved that. Hey, here's how I did it. And you know, to have somebody at a much larger organization go. How did you figure that out? Because you guys are a little.

Antonio Marin: Didn't work for me. Don't go there. Yeah. Yeah. It goes in so many ways. Or if I start my project again, I would have done this.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. Mr. Marina, I truly appreciate it. Thank you for your time today. And, all of you that are listening out there, please leave a comment. Give us a like, hit those upvote buttons and all of those different things for us. we truly appreciate your time and you're taking a moment to listen to us because we want you to be heard just like we've been heard. So thank you very much.