459- Make the Approved Path Fast Enough w/Brandon Muncy

Brandon Muncy's path into IT leadership wasn't a straight line. After an engineering degree he went into retail management at Verizon and AT&T to pick up the business side, then moved into research computing at the university. From 2018 to about 2021 he was the Linux person on a 10-node cluster, hundreds of VMs, a deep-learning machine and a VDI setup for researchers. PepperPointe, where he now leads IT, is a dental service organization in Lexington, Kentucky with hundreds of practices across a couple of states. When he joined in late 2022, its IT was fully outsourced, with no internal team. He has built a team of about seven people for upwards of 1,500 users.

He found out that you don't change the perception by explaining it. Better decks didn't work, because nobody updates a belief based off a slide, so he works one visible win at a time, and onboarding is one of the vehicles. When a new hire starts on Monday and IT finds out Monday, everybody has a bad week, even though everyone involved did their job. Instead of blaming the office, which is busy running a practice, his team went to the office managers and, looking at onboarding from their chair, found a defining step that tells IT sooner. He also describes his real bad day: by 4 o'clock he has been useful maybe 11 times and hasn't moved a single thing forward.

On AI, Brandon says that in healthcare it shows up as a governance question before it shows up as a capability question. People using ChatGPT on their own save 30 minutes a day and won't wait six weeks for a review, so he wants an approved path fast enough that a shortcut isn't tempting, even if the first version is half-baked. Only his administrators have access to Copilot, so the team can start working on DLP policies. His 18-month prediction is identity and permissions for non-human actors: if the tool touches patient data, it's a business associate, and he expects an enforcement story.