415- Work Smarter Not Harder w/Rob Spellman

Mike Kelley: Hey everybody, welcome to another You've Been Heard. Today we're operating at scale twenty years in and just getting started with Rob Spillman. Rob, introduce yourself and welcome to the show.

Rob Spellman: Hey. Thank you. Mike. I'm Rob Spellman. I'm the chief information officer with QTC Health Services, a wholly owned subsidiary of Leidos.

Mike Kelley: Alright, so twenty years in, tell me a little bit more about that. How'd you get to where you are and what have you done to have been heard, to become the chief information officer.

Rob Spellman: Yeah. It's been a journey. I just celebrated, twenty years with Leidos. before that, I did a five year stint with, it started off as American management systems and then spun off, the piece I was with spun off and was purchased by CACI. So I've kind of been in this systems integrator defense contractor role for my whole career. when I started off, I was a database administrator. I started on Oracle and then transitioned over to Microsoft SQL server. and I really loved it. it was one of those things, as you go through and you're working your undergraduate degree, computer science was my major, but it's such a broad field. I really, struggled for the first couple years and I can write code. I don't really love writing code. but when I got into a database class, I think it was my junior year, it was like a light went off and I was like I love databases and I love database architecture and data structures and, all this cool stuff that you can do with it. And, so really started off as a DBA and then, made over twenty five years, took on different projects, different roles. and about, almost four years ago now I moved into the CIO role, that I'm in now. So, this is it. Rarely people ever get to say that, they're working their dream job. But even when I was early on in my IT career and I had a lot of great, like CIOs that ran the organization, a lot of them that I looked up to. But early on, I kind of latched on to that. And I was like, man, I'd love to be a CIO one day. And, the fact that.

Mike Kelley: I was going to ask.

Rob Spellman: Yeah.

Mike Kelley: How, what was the path? Because I've interviewed probably fifteen, twenty other people at this level and I have not run across somebody who started off as the DBA and then made it into, not made it into, but aspired to and got there, to become one of the CIOs. It seems like typically the DBA is really kind of like that, that office in the corner and, just they're usually curmudgeons work on. Yeah, yeah, I didn't want to say that.

Rob Spellman: And yeah, I think what served me best throughout my career. I point back to something that my father instilled in me when I was young. he used to always say that whenever you're in a room and they're looking for somebody to do something that's like, really difficult. Nobody wants to do it. Nobody's raising their hand. Be the one to raise your hand. Right. So I think I never shied away from any assignment, any crazy task or anything along those lines. And, having those opportunities and exposures, I think that's really what has helped me, throughout my whole professional career, even in my personal life, right? Like, when you see something and I guess I've never thought anything was unattainable or that I couldn't do something. It's kind of.

Mike Kelley: Okay. So that willingness to participate and that willingness to tackle those projects, that can be a double edged sword. So obviously, I'm assuming came out on the right side of the sword, more often than not. Otherwise, you probably would not have continued to move forward in into management and become heard. What do you think are the things that helped you to go from being one that's willing to jump in to one that was asked to lead?

Rob Spellman: well, one is you kind of hit on it, right? You've got to execute. you've got to have proven performance. You've got to have a, proven track record before somebody will even trust you with something along those lines, right? So you, can't expect to come in on day one and, have somebody entrust you with, the hardest task or, ask you to lead something. So, where you can you make your mark. You prove yourself and you deliver, right? I mean, our current CEO, Tom Bell, he's got a saying, right? Like, we don't need doers. We need donors, right? We need people that can get things done. And, like I always tell my boss, our CEO and I'm always like, I'm the guy that can get things done. right. Whether it's, fighting the battles with cybersecurity, whether it's convincing a customer, we need to go in a certain direction or not. Like, for, more often than not that's, been one of my, special powers, right? Somehow or another, I can find a way. I just, I'm like a bulldog, right? Like I don't ever give up. And, some way or another, there's a way to get it done.

Mike Kelley: yeah, you know what? For me, that's one of the most enjoyable parts of what we do is here's a challenge. here's a puzzle. Figure it out. and I always, I like, I just look at things and I try to figure out what's the design here. Why did they do this? Why did they do that? And, so it's yeah, there's a good chunk of that. Are there any, tips? And actually, you know, what, you mentioned something that I didn't have in my career, which was you had a lot of other CIOs to look to, to follow in the footsteps of, people who blazed the path before you. what did talk to me some about that. I can ask specific questions, but I'd really rather leave it open ended and hear what your experiences were around that.

Rob Spellman: Yeah, it was varied. I'd say I had some CIOs. You learned what not to do from, and some you learned like what to do and how to emulate. One thing that did scare me always about the CIO position, as I was like, making my way up the career ladder and always had this aspiration and like you said, I've had experience with so many different CIOs. And the reason is because like the industry average, like the last time I looked at it, the average tenure for CIO is eighteen months, right? that may have changed, but I remember looking at that one time and I was like, wow. And sometimes we had CIOs, they'd come in, they wouldn't last eighteen months, right? And we'd have some that would come in and would really be successful and last several years. So we had that, wide range that I've, worked with and, over the last fifteen years in my career, I've gotten to work closer and closer with, different CIOs. but, it's definitely a mixed bag. And I, and it was funny, like when I finally got into the CIO role, I remember like thinking to myself and I was like, I was ecstatic, right? And I was so happy because I like had accomplished this, career long goal. But at the same time, I thought to myself, I was like, you know what? This is probably the first time in my life that I can almost expect to be fired from a job, right? just because there's so much turnover, within the C-suite, especially within the CIO role. So that was kind of an epiphany. Like, I had one mentor that was always told me, be careful what you wish for because you might just get it right. but every day I've enjoyed, so like, I'm glad to say I'm past the eighteen months, period and, still trucking.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. You said four or five years.

Rob Spellman: Yeah. going on four years. So, okay. In April. Yeah. it'll be four years. So, still waking up every day and, love it, it's been interesting. And like I said, I've over twenty five year career. I can think of at least a dozen different CIOs, that, kind of ring around in my head.

Mike Kelley: Wow. Okay. Interesting. any, great law, lessons or thoughts or, things that you carry with you forward like that one of, be careful what you wish for.

Rob Spellman: Yeah. One thing that is always another thing, like one of my guiding principles, and I learned this like when I was a kid as well. Right? and I've always lived by this. And whether it's work or personal life, golf, I'm an avid golfer, but, work smarter, not harder. Right? so I've always, and as I got into technology and computer science and discovered programming and automation and things like that, I was just kind of always enamored with that. I was like, like now I have this way to implement and make things smarter. Make things easier on myself. Make things more efficient. So I think my quirkiness I've always loved like looking at a process. partnering with the business and saying, hey, I know you've done this the last twenty years this way, but what if we did this? and what advantages that could bring to the company and what efficiencies and especially now like, as everybody's going through AOP, they're, getting challenges and then you see the capabilities of AI coming out and everybody try to jump at that, right? So automation is just going to the next level with AI. but it's just, that one principle has just, it's helped me throughout my whole career. I can remember being a DBA and even writing code. One of the things I loved was like writing code that wrote code. Right? so, that was, I always thought that was like the coolest thing ever. And I was in a chat GPT session, just a few hours ago, and they were talking about how, using the ChatGPT to help you write a better prompt. Right? And I was like, oh, it's like, that kind of reminds me of like back when code would write other code. so, it just really cool that that's always been a thing of mine. Like, work smarter, not harder. And, just a funny fact, as a kid, I was a huge fan of, DuckTales, the original DuckTales, not the remake they've done recently, but, Scrooge McDuck, that was like his character. He was always work smarter, not harder. and it just.

Mike Kelley: It's such a more elegant way of putting it than the way I tend to tell people. I tell people, hey, you know what? I'm kind of lazy. I like to let the computer do the work for me. I say it that way because I think of it being funny, but yeah, your articulation of it spot on too, because I love making the system do the work for me, especially any of that boring, constant, repetitive type work. I want to automate that stuff. I've always wanted to automate that stuff, never really got the chance to do much of the code writing code until now.

Rob Spellman: No, it's amazing. looking at where it's come from twenty five years ago to now and it's just like, wow, it's like you said, I mean, I remember hearing the phrase like citizen developer. I don't know, maybe five, seven years ago.

Mike Kelley: Like, like, yeah, like say ten.

Rob Spellman: Yeah. Maybe ten years ago. Right. But it took a long time to like, I look at where we are now and I'm like, hey, like, you can actually really start to use that, right? so.

Mike Kelley: So okay, here's, here's an interesting segue. And I kind of warned you that we'd had this discussion a little bit. You're doing health services, you're contracting with government. or I believe Leidos is contracting with government. Not a true government organization. Correct. And so yeah.

Rob Spellman: I can explain it, but go ahead.

Mike Kelley: so in that imbalance there and then bringing in the thought of like the citizen developer, that throws like a third aspect of, I just see these as competing roles. or where there's lots of role conflict. And so I'm interested in, one, go ahead and fill me in on exactly how the interaction between Leidos and the government works. And then two, that the health versus the, government security policies and all of those and the push and pull there. And then the thought of empowering citizen developers to be able to do stuff in that kind of an environment. I mean, there's a whole conversation. There's a at least an hour's worth of talking right there.

Rob Spellman: Yeah. And there's a lot of different personas. So at QTC, right? We, we're in the business of, delivering managed health services. So, our biggest customer is the VA, the veterans affairs. So we process about sixty percent of all the disability payments. So in that scenario, we're providing a service, but basically we're helping, the veterans file a claim with the VA. That claim will come to us and we take the claimant and we put them in touch. We scheduled our appointment with the best available provider. Right. So, at the heart of it, that's one of the things we and a claimant, they may have multiple claims, right? There may be one. There may be twenty. there could be a lot of contingencies is what we call it. Right. So, it may be one appointment, maybe four appointments. but to do that and to have our system where we're consuming, the medical records, we process over fourteen million pages of medical records. right. And we have, yeah, we, over the last five years, we've done a ton of modernization there. We used to have hundreds of people that would take those medical records and do what we call bookmarking them. because you may have a problem with your knee, but you have a long medical history. You know, you may be a veteran that's eighty nine years old. You've got thousands and thousands of pages of medical records, but you're very concerned about your knee or your hearing? when we just we just can't give a provider ten thousand pages. Say, hey, go read this whole thing and figure it out. We could, but that provider would charge you a gazillion dollars to do that, right? so what we do is we, we do the bookmarks, right? So if anything that's related to the need or to the hearing, we would bookmark that, make it easier for the provider to go and find the historical data, read it, do their exam and basically, document the results and then it goes into a rating system. but it's very interesting how all that happens. but in order to operate like that, we have to get, an ATO, which stands for authority to operate. So whatever technology we're using, the way that data is being transmitted, how VA is transmitting it to us, how we're taking that data, what we're doing with that data, how we're transmitting it to the provider, how the provider is transmitting back to us, and then how we at the end take what the provider has given us. Take what the VA has given us, take what the examinee has filled out and their questionnaires, put that all together and deliver the case back to the VA so they can make a decision. We have to have an authority to operate that explains that entire architecture, all the systems, applications, technologies, how the data moves around, all that has to be documented, to the infantry and certified by the VA, by the DoD. so yeah, that's why, it's a big barrier to entry, right? Like you don't see just everybody doing these exams. There's, four people in the world that do them. Right. So, it's a huge barrier because it is so complicated.

Mike Kelley: Right? And I'm just thinking of the compliance that's involved. You know, you've got the HIPAA compliance, you've got the DoD compliance, the CMMC. You've got like, you want to talk about somebody who's under scrutiny and has to worry about any of those audits, any of that compliance you've got. You guys are getting it from multiple sides.

Rob Spellman: Yeah. And it's funny because like forever, until I moved over to the QTC subsidiary of Leidos, I was at Leidos and I was at CACI and I was working for the Army. I was working for the Navy. And it was DoD, which is now, you know, DOW. Right. But, when I came to QTC and then you through the PHI and all the health stuff at it, you know, adding that extra layer on top is definitely, a challenge, something we've gotten really good at. But, it's just another layer of what you have to do. And then you look at the evolution over the last decade, how everybody's moving out of their data centers into the cloud, the complexity with that. What inheritance are you getting from the cloud provider? None of this can live in the commercial space. It's got to all be FedRAMP. It's got to be in Govcloud, etc., so a lot of it is you try to look to the vendors and partner with the AWS of the world and make sure that they're compliant and that you can inherit some of that compliance into your system and into your ATO. but it's kind of fascinating when you get like you could spend hours and hours kind of diving into this and talking about it. It's complicated, but, when it comes together and you get that beautiful picture at the end, and people are able to look at it and understand and explain it, it's something else.

Mike Kelley: So alright, let's now throw that third piece in there. So you've got all of that up and running and working and now you've got an individual who is utilizing the systems that you're responsible for taking care of. And they want to leverage some of these new modern tools, those AI tools, to do anything. how are you working with that? How are you setting that up for approval and use and, or how are you controlling it? How are you keeping me from opening up my Gemini, my personal Gemini account and interacting with that and potentially destroying all of that compliance?

Rob Spellman: Yeah. So that's a very heavy question. and it's a different question because we gotta worry about not only our employees, but the customer is very concerned about the provider. What's stopping the doctor from just going to ChatGPT and say, hey, like, what's wrong with this guy's knee? Right? so we're being asked to put a lot of safeguards in place to ensure that. Like one of the things we track, how much time is the doctor taking to fill out the form? Right. How much time is the doctor taking on this section? How much time are they taking on that section? Right. So that way it gives us a good idea of, hey, this they spent this amount of time here that's equivalent to what we would expect where if something was coming in like copy paste, copy paste, that would be a red flag. We would dive deeper into it. so we have safeguards on that end. from a employee perspective, as we're working and supporting, the mission, right. we started off initially, I think kind of like everybody else, right? When, ChatGPT came out and kind of exploded open, I exploded on the scene. Everybody's like, oh, this is cool, but like, it's scary. and, the first thing we did was block it. Right? we blocked access to it, which is, you can argue if it was good or bad. I think there's, you know, you could argue either side, right? I think initially, when you don't know or you don't have a plan in place, maybe it's not the worst thing to do. but we knew right away that this wasn't going away. and employees, whether it's copilot, whether it's ChatGPT, whether it's Gemini, whether it's Gronk, whatever it is, and whether they're using a lighthouse endpoint that we control or they go to their mobile device, which is just as powerful and go to a personal account. We much rather have them use a corporate controlled account, versus, their personal device that, then they're potentially exposing. So what we did was, we've gone enterprise with ChatGPT, where we control the data. The data is not being consumed into the large language model as we interact with it. So, and then we're also, we have different classifications of data. not all data can be, processed through it, but, really trying to have, the privacy in place to protect the data, to classify the data so employees know what they're working with and what platforms they can work with that data on.

Mike Kelley: So I'm interested on portion of that, thing that you just mentioned. So classifying the data and if you've classified this data, are there other, restrictions in place that keep me from being able to use that data? Or is it that I know what the classification is. And thus, if I use that data in one of these, or provide it to one of these models and ask questions about it, even if it's not being shared. is it left to the employee or are there constraints in place?

Rob Spellman: No, it's a combination of both. Right. like even though we have enterprise ChatGPT, we've turned off the connectors, right? So it can't connect to SharePoint folders. It can't connect to email. we're, I'm really pressing to get there, right? Because there are some use cases where I've created a custom GPT and I'm like, man, it would be so much easier if I could just add it to the email thread and have it consume it that way. versus having to go there and upload it.

Mike Kelley: Well, that whole bookmarking process is a perfect thing for this to do.

Rob Spellman: Well, we've been doing the bookmarking, so we moved from that, manual process several years ago and we use NLP. so basically every medical record we get, we OCR it, it goes through NLP and the NLP process. The natural language processing is where we go ahead and we've automated a lot of the bookmarking. So I'd say we still have a team that will do some manual bookmarking. some providers will only work with us if it's had a manual review. but everything is running through the automation and then where we have some high, certain providers or we have certain cases, we will go ahead and have a manual review on top of that. But in terms of trying to protect the data, which, you know, is probably the number one job of the CIO. yeah, I think having the taxonomy in place, you know, protecting the data, is always priority number one. So we do that with extensive training. we have our annual trainings and things we have to do, but we also do that with the systems to try to make them smart enough to know, even like with email. Right? Like, hey, email will stop you from sending something out if it thinks. It's protected, right? Or if it's tagged a certain way.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. The DLP and.

Rob Spellman: Correct. And then having the, logging in place to, so like even using enterprise ChatGPT. That's the great thing, right? we are able to log all that track all the data that's going into it, the questions that are being asked. And if we did see somebody that kind of did something they shouldn't, we can go back to that person and kind of do some, redirection. That's the right.

Mike Kelley: Word. Okay. Yeah. interesting. so all of this said, how do you empower that citizen developer then? because there's a lot of these constraints and there's no connectors available. So how do you empower the citizen developer with that tool set today? Or are you still just trying to work through that to be able to get to a point where you can empower them.

Rob Spellman: No, I think we're at a point where they're empowered. and I think, it goes beyond that, right? I remember ten plus years ago, we always relied on SharePoint. We had a lot of stuff, a lot of business processes built on SharePoint. And, you used to have to know how to develop and be able to use SharePoint designer. So if you've ever dealt with SharePoint and SharePoint designer, it's, was a real Pita. and, only the elite power users could do it. and then eventually we bought a tool called Nintex. Right. And it turned it into a GUI based drag and drop. You can build this highly complex workflow. so we've come a long way over the ten years, right to from that. but that was a good example where it's like, hey, like, there's a lot of different ways. Over the last several years, we've empowered users and AI is just another piece of that. but, I look at the tools we have today. and one just being on Microsoft three hundred sixty five and teams and, some of the things that we've done with, ServiceNow and move works and the bots that we've deployed. So, yeah, it's always a challenge. You're always going to be challenged to deliver more. And I think that just table stakes, right? Like every, you give somebody something, you give them an inch, they're going to want a mile, right? but I think you have to progress in a smart fashion to not go all the way over the top, give too much, and then you have the negative consequences of that and then you're pulling back and, it's kind of what do they say? Like, once you take the boy out of the farm and take him to the city, it's hard to get the city out of them, right? So, I think you gotta be cautious, but you gotta, you gotta move. and deliver as well. So it's a fine line, but I do think that users are more empowered today than they ever have been.

Mike Kelley: Right? I tend to agree that they're more empowered. I was just wondering what it was like trying to empower them within all of that compliance and all of the restrictions and things that you have to deal with. One thing I've got to deal with.

Rob Spellman: Yeah. So one thing we're trying to do now, we're, actually in the midst of kind of implementing a couple tools that are going to help us with that. Because one of the biggest challenges we have is empowering people and allowing them to use real data, right? Especially when you're dealing with like medical records, you can't be sharing PHI around, right? So what we're working on is, and the test data we've had historically is just. It's never great. It's never been good enough to, do what we need to do. So but if we can take that data and redact it. And like I said, when you're getting a ten thousand page medical record, you don't have time or resources to go and manually redact it. Right? So we're looking at some technologies now that we're trying to implement that are going to allow us to make a pool of test data readily available to users. So that'll take some of the handcuffs off and say, hey, you've got a sandbox. Now you've got all your sand, which is that test data that is very realistic, but has been redacted to remove any PHI any GUI, any of that good stuff. and allow them to kind of go to town with it and see what they do quite honestly.

Mike Kelley: I'm wondering about that or thinking about all of that because that touches on a couple of different topics that are, towards the top of all of this. so, the data sets that you have available. If you could completely anonymize those data sets and then allow people in out at those data sets, that's kind of like exactly what you're talking about, removing the AI and then now, if I can look at ten thousand people, the ten thousand documents for each individual of ten thousand people, and then start to look at what's going on within there, then I might be able to discover or find more patterns or, the exceptions and isolate those cases and discover that and.

Rob Spellman: Or train language models, all kinds of stuff. Right? So that's to me, like that's been holding us back, right? Because there's so much protection around the real data. You have this goldmine of data, but you can't use it, right? You can't make it readily available because you have to protect it, because it's so sensitive, because it's PHI. Because it's GUI. so, making this investment that we are to easily take that and clean it and make it available to a normal end user to play around with is going to be a real game changer, I think.

Mike Kelley: Or those researchers and those, people trying to figure things, the different things out.

Rob Spellman: But just training, right? Training new employees, right.

Mike Kelley: So, here's the flip side of it. in a way that really just kind of hit me during this conversation. And that is all right. So we're worried about biases. We're worried about the machines finding and furthering biases. But, so that anonymized data, you're going to want to pull some of those, attributes out of it so that it doesn't, lean into the bias. But at the same time, you almost need some of those attributes in there so that it can help identify if there is a genealogical or, there's a bias based off, of genealogy.

Rob Spellman: and imagine being able to take that same data set, run it with one set of attributes, get the results, mix up the attributes just to test if there is bias and get the results. And then you can kind of prove whether you have bias or you don't.

Mike Kelley: Okay, interesting way of thinking about it and dealing with it there. So some of the fun, some of the things that, we get to look forward to playing with and trying to figure out how do we, provide these? you made that statement earlier of, you know, it's the CIO's job to keep that data, contained. But, in my mind instantly jumped to, well, keep that data contained from the outside world while empowering and letting that data flow freely for the inside world. So it's that dichotomy of, don't allow, but allow and oh, don't allow, but allow specifically and correct.

Rob Spellman: That's why the taxonomy is so important, right? and being able to tag the data and, there's, various, you go to any conference, you'll get inundated by vendors saying they can do that. But yeah, you gotta, you gotta be able to classify the data, right?

Mike Kelley: Yeah. Oh, and, alright, we've both been in it for this long, you know, twenty years ago as we started to talk about classifying data, that was a purely manual play back then and it started to speed up and it started to be automated today. You got something to say? I can see it on your face.

Rob Spellman: No, it's just it's grown too from it used to just be you'd get this high level classification, but now you get all the metadata that goes with it, right? So for us, like I'm always interested in the metadata. Yes. Like, hey, this has PHI, but is this for the VA? Is it for the FBI? Is it for the Navy? Is it for the Army? Like who does this belong to? Right. So, the tools that we have now and the capabilities. You don't have to do it manually. you're able to automate a lot of that, but you're also able to pull the metadata out of so much easier now and have that many more applications to it. So.

Mike Kelley: So, Nice. Yeah. It's amazing how our world has really radically changed in the last, really in the last seven years. I mean, we had a lot of technology starting to change or continuing to change, I really should say. and then of course, Covid hits and everything changes radically for that. And now we continue to keep some of those things like the telework. So another shift in the conversation, somewhere I saw and read, the mention of, bringing services to a gymnasium for the service members. And yeah, I'm thinking about how, radically different that is because of all of the other compliance that we've been talking about now to have a pop up site and make sure that everything's still compliant and secure for that. what about those kinds of scenarios and how much have you had to deal with that?

Rob Spellman: it's a great, question. one of the things we do, one of our customers with the DoD, we manage the reserve health readiness program. So basically anybody who's a reservist, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, any National Guard, Marine Corps, as a reservist, you have to maintain your readiness status, right? that means basically think of it as like an annual physical. we do audio, we do dental, we do full physical workup, blood work, all of those things, flu shots, we, you name it, we do all that stuff to ensure the readiness of the soldiers. and we have to come to them sometimes, right? So, sometimes they may come to one of our clinics. but a lot of times the way we service those, reservists when they're doing their, weekend duty, we will go to an armory here in a gymnasium, and turn it into a clinic, right? And it's almost I remember when I played high school football and spring in the early days, it was always like my coach called it a county fair. And there was like, you did this drill here, you did this drill here, you did this drill there. And we do that with the gymnasium. We'll set the dentist up in this corner. We'll put the audiology booth over here. We'll put the eye exam over here and we'll do the blood work over here. So you look at this gymnasium with the basketball hoops, and then all of a sudden you've got all these, event classifications there and we're active. We got a dentist over there filling cavities, right? so it's crazy. there's a lot of logistics in that, from a IT security standpoint, standing up the network to make all that work, the connectivity, but also making sure that you've got enough providers, you've got the right type of providers, you've got the right number of dentists, you've got the right number of audiologists, you've got people that can draw the blood. So there's so much that goes into it. It's really fun. But like we on a any given weekend, we may do fifty of those. We may do sixty of those on a weekend. We'll see over sometimes over one hundred thousand service members, right. So there's so much volume with it to us. And before we took over this program, they used to, and this just shows you like how crazy is that used to all be paper based. So you'd go to a, group event, something along those lines. You'd see the provider, they'd write it all on paper. That paper would get sent to a warehouse full of people that did data entry into the back end government system. so as we've taken over that program, we've automated that, we've built integrations in with those DoD systems. And why you're seeing the provider now they're actually in the web app, putting in the results and everything's being calculated and sent. So it's great for the reservists because historically it would take weeks and weeks, if not months to get their readiness stamped. now it's like real time, right? So at the end of the event, we're sending all that stuff and it's turning them green, as we call it, which is key because if you're not green, you're not eligible for promotion, you're not eligible for training. A bunch of other things have a big ramification on your status in your career.

Mike Kelley: So do they. Are there lots of times where they call you guys in for one of those pop ups like that? And then they've also called a bunch of the reservists in at the exact same time, so that they can feed them through that and get everybody green and then move on with their maneuver or whatever.

Rob Spellman: They come from everywhere, right? If you're in a remote area, they may have traveled a couple hundred miles to get there. We have what they call walk ins. we get a roster ahead of time, so we kind of know what to expect. And that's why we're able to do the planning and know how many doctors we need, how many dentists we need. But we also are able to accommodate a certain amount of walk ons. okay. Walk ins. So and the cool thing is like when you walk in, in order to service you, we need your medical history, right? So for everybody who's on the roster, we'll pull that ahead of time and have that loaded in the system. And the challenge, you know, we had to solve for this. We're like, wow, like for walk ins. How do we do that? And like, how do we make sure we can get it in real time? So the integrations we put in place and how we're able to pull the data from the DoD network and pull it in and make it available and service people real time, without notice as a walk in is, has been a huge feat for us.

Mike Kelley: wow, sounds like quite the challenge and a heck of a weekend. And luckily, I'm betting that you don't have to be overseeing many of these. I'm sure you probably go to a few of them a year. Just to make sure and watch and see what's going on and see if there's ways that you can help optimize that process.

Rob Spellman: Yes, they're extraordinary and it's seeing people make their way through and the different, stations. It's amazing. and we recently, one of the big things we do is disaster recovery, right? so we did a full doctor failover. We did a, had a doctor scenario and we actually enacted it and did a failover while we were hosting events for the first time ever. Right. so it's like, it's like every year we try to make it harder and harder on ourselves, right as we do our exercise. And the customer was like, hey, why don't we do it while we have, group events running? Because I think there were three active events that weekend that happened to be scheduled. so they were comfortable with like, hey, if we have an impact or all this stuff. But it was really cool because in forty eight minutes we had the system entirely failed over and shifted from running out of a data center in California to running out of a data center in Carrollton, Texas. and basically, it went really well, but we were able to do that and accommodate things.

Mike Kelley: Wow. Okay. that must have taken some planning yeah,

Rob Spellman: We've been executing on that program now for almost three years. So, and it's continued to evolve.

Mike Kelley: All right. So I promised you a question And that question was, I need you to make a prediction. What will everybody be talking about as far as it goes in eighteen months? what do you think our discussions will be about?

Rob Spellman: Yeah, well, I just think that, people are going to continue to evolve and look at like what the IT organization looks like. we talked a little bit about it, like with the citizen developers and that becoming more and more, I think we're going to see the focus move away from these big monolithic legacy IT departments. and move kind of have the line blur, right? Where business is doing more of the development business is doing more of the, design and execution of things. and not needing the traditional IT folks as much. So I think, eighteen months from now, you're going to see a major shift in, fewer people on IT, but more people in the business, doing those tasks that it people used to do. So, yeah, that, that'd be my prediction.

Mike Kelley: it's a good one. I've been hearing that from different places. I was going through a planning session myself and, the facilitator was talking about exactly that, saying that, his estimate was going to be that very soon. The traditional development and that portion of the IT group is going to there, we're going to disappear or we're going to infiltrate, and we're going to be on the ground with the rest of the business. We will just be part of the business. Yes. And we'll just the normal Employee will have that level of it just baked into their job.

Rob Spellman: Correct. Just like Copilot's built into outlook now. Right. So I think the same thing. and to be honest, that's where IT and those skills are most effective close to the business. who knows how to make something smarter than the person doing it, right? so, I think it's going to be a big change, a big shift, but it's something that I'm excited about and looking forward to.

Mike Kelley: Me too. Right on, thank you everybody and let us know what you think of that You've Been Heard Podcast and make sure to drop a like or a comment and let us know so that we can make sure that we're bringing you the content that you want. So, everybody have a wonderful day.