458- Stop Turning the Light Off w/John Errington

John Errington fell into IT by accident. A couple of years out of high school he was working in records management at a pharmaceutical company, where knowing how to turn on a computer made him the de facto local IT guy. At GSI Commerce, a Linux shop he joined in 2010, a new leader pulled him into IT leadership "kicking and screaming," and his own light bulb moment came when he got a script put on an alert his team kept clearing by hand.

He often uses the light analogy with the teams he manages, and they hate to hear it: the light you turn off every day is the thing to automate, and the value add is fixing the core of the problem. Four weeks into a new job in material handling, he explains how he learns a business he doesn't know yet. It starts with the people with their boots on the ground. Here, that meant ride-alongs with the field service techs, the people who "keep the cash register open."

John also gets into how silos breed a not-it mentality on outage calls, and the SWAT team approach John's operations teams used instead: everybody jumps in and stays until they're cleared. John sees AI the way he saw automation, as a tool that needs a human at the decision-making part. In his last job, AI postmortems of recorded major-incident calls took much of three to four days of work down to a 20-minute process, and his problem managers still reviewed all of it for accuracy.