so welcome to another episode of uh Tech unhinged it’s a podcast where we kind of dive into the unfiltered reality of Technology [Music] Innovation I’m Asher and today we’ll be exploring the Journey of you know navigating modern businesses by overcoming outdated Technologies and also how do we harness you know or create certain data driven insights uh joining me is Chris Gomez CEO of Barett value Cent uh it’s a global consultancy dedicated to transforming organizational culture um through leadership trainings and assessments um Chris has over 26 years of experience in the business consultancy space and uh we love to hear you know invaluable insights from you on on how this journey has been welcome to the show Chris great to be here thanks for having me awesome why don’t you tell me a little about yourself about BBC and what’s your role been there so um yeah I’m CEO and co-founder of Barrett Value Center and and we’ve been doing this for about 27 years now and my educational training was actually in computer science so it’s kind of a bit of a career shift uh into organizational development throughout the kind of quarter of a century that we’ve been doing this um so I’ve kind of seen both the back office sides of things and then also the client facing sides of things and you know have I think a unique uh experience background in you know putting these two things together to make business kind of function well so um you know my role in the origins of our company really was around um you know there’s three of us that started it you know how do three people create a global consultancy right we can’t be all around the world at the same time you know so we had to leverage technology pretty heavily um in order to kind of scale up on the consultancy side of things you know and now we have you know Consultants around the world uh working with all kinds of organizations of every industry shape and size um our stuff is in 65 plus languages so you know we rely on on technology heavily all right that’s good to know so that’s funny right so I also have a engineering background and uh you know I I I graduated you know couple decades back but I typically tell to people that by heart I’m an engineer but by profession I’ve I’ve you know been everything else right so be it sales be it operation be it the admin be it whatever so the past you know almost 10 12 a years but um absolutely and I think when when you building businesses having this you know background of engineering you tend to look at everything from a very process point of view and you you think in that way that hey if I do X Y and Z how can I get to you know whatever I have to get to and everything so that’s uh that’s good to know and that’s interesting kind of out of out of my degree was um it’s it’s more about problem Sol solving you know I think you know maybe your experience might be similar that computer science Majors we’re the laziest people we’re looking for the efficient quick solution right to solve to solve the big complex problems um and so how you know that’s how I kind of pivoted into kind of more leadership or not non-technical role is okay well how do I tap into that mentality that thinking on understanding complex problems how do you dissect them and then how do you kind of implement Solutions to navigate effective paths yeah so what inspired you to go into culture and those kind of Transformations I mean transforming organizations from a cultural perspective you know it’s kind of it’s it is a funny story you know have to dust off a few brain cells to go way back um to the origins of this but the the feeling was you know I was cutting my teeth in a in a consultancy in the United States and the other two co-founders were also coming from you know consultancies and this might be a similar experience to people listening the podcast is like when organizations are trying to quotquot get better the traditional methods are we’re going to send you to a training or we’re going to reorganize or we’re going to Institute a new process or a new widget or a new system or a new thing right to figure out and we quickly realize the missing ingredient in that we’re people you know organizations are human Centric it’s all about people true until our AI overlords kind of take over it’s still so yeah um and and and so how do how do we kind of fill that space to not remove training not remove systems and processes and reorganizations but support them better um through culture and values and so that’s that’s the market that we kind of pioneered um back in 1997 um to help organizations with that and and they’ve come you know back in those days they didn’t talk about culture they didn’t talk about values they talked about Six Sigma and you know agile came later and all those other kinds of great things now people understand leaderships understand that you know you have to work on your culture to make those things effective so talking about culture what do you think are the values that best represent BBC in generally right so what is the culture at your organization we we eat our own porage as we say um and so we do our own assessments and kind of do our own work because you can’t sell what uh you don’t have and um the you know the consistent set of values that I think that I have seen over the last two decades humor fund um I think is a you know both a personal value and we Foster in the organization uh because you know we do think we should have a good time we work hard um but we enjoy each other’s company and the second one is also caring um this is a relationship based business um and so you know caring was is a is a Common Thread and then making a difference which is what the purpose of of the organization is about it’s like you know we how do we change the philosophy of business at a global level how do we help organizations not just be a great place to work not just be a high- performing organization and not just you know thinking about what’s their legacy and impact on society but all those things together so um that was the driving that’s the those are the driving yeah absolutely I think and and culture can be the biggest impact factor that you can put in in any organization be it 50 people be it 5,000 people because once you fix that from the ground up any hirings you do any other people that join you they all kind of live breathe the same air and you know it’s it just becomes a tradition of sorts or or a culture of sorts where the growth automatically then starts happening so yeah it is like it is it’s a human sector business right we’re all corre people we all have needs and we all have kind of Ambitions and motivations we also have all of our learning edges and our blind spots right yeah and so when you know when we take the opportunity to look at those what are our strengths what are our blind spots where do we want to grow and evolve both personally and professionally right and we can harness that and align it that’s where you see high performing teams High performing organizations yeah where you’re not paying atten attention to those things you can sense it when you walk into the room oh there’s some dysfunction here right yeah and that’s that’s a loss of productivity that’s a loss of efficiency a loss of profits or margin right if you let it get out again so it’s a really impactful and important component to business that I think a lot of leaders are getting to now um and if you look at the headlines it’s it’s kind of the fundamental golden thread through most of the challenges that leaders are facing like the return to office or remote work state yeah they it’s about productivity but the underlying thing is What’s the culture because both sides of the argument have seen success in the office and also remote so what’s the underlying thing it’s not the location what is it ah how do you build a culture to support whatever decision it is that you you wish to implement that the best serves the strategy of your business right yeah that’s true and that’s the missing piece of that conversation yeah yeah okay yeah absolutely I think that makes sense I mean and and one of the things that I’ve seen in in U um one of the you know things that come up is a lot of times people are able to Define certain values they would say we need to have integrity we should have trust but they often lack in in in outlining that hey how what do you mean when you say have integrity I mean everybody wants to have integrity right so they had case in point the Leman Brothers had it like written on their VA all and but right so I think a lot of times organizations really have to understand that he if I’m counting or putting this as something on a wall what does it mean from a behavior standup point of view what does it mean to uh to read it and and this book by I think um the culture code by I think Netflix uh CEO was that also they also Define these things that it’s the behaviors that eventually uh you know when they come together def that so yeah yeah yeah we I mean we often see unfortunately there are organizations of leaders that um just like there’s green washing kind of culture washing so we’re going to put these really wonderful words up on the lobby wall that says that we’re all about us but it’s just it’s it’s PR it’s fiction right you know so part of what we do is like we kind of you know assess you what’s the reality what is it like when you walk into the room versus what you’re kind of and does it line up to what you’re what you’re saying right and then the Gap analysis is also quite revealing where the leadership team might be thinking oh well we’re all of this but then when you work with staff you say well tell us about you know your experience here and it’s a very different story and it’s a huge gap the huge gap what’s where’s the misalignment where’s the the lack of communication or what’s the where’s the disconnect in this because that’s often going to manifest itself symptomatically and other things of like inefficiency or bureaucracy or you know people making afraid to make mistakes because there different sets of expectations That’s not healthy for any type of organization that’s true in so yeah we see a lot of the the the kind of uh culture washing and as you say it’s like when I see kind of Integrity I think it’s an important value sure and you know it’s fine you know I want us to have integrity just as much um but what’s what’s our unique fingerprint right what’s our what’s our specialness in terms of how we want to um create the culture of how we want to get things done um and so that’s that’s to me the the it’s not the competitive Advantage it’s the sustainable Advantage for organizations that’s true and I think it can become a competitive Advantage as well I mean why not so if it there an organization that’s really aligned and everybody knows it it automatically should get to that stage where they want to get to at least because they’re ining the people and and everybody so that’s good so uh yeah you mentioned you started as a you actually did computer science graduate and everything so I can saying that you were the one of the initial people who built your software the the entire technology so what was that experience about and uh how quickly was it a one man you know sitting down doing NS all day all night or what was the you know I don’t think we were quite in a garage as as the kind of famous Tech stories are but we were in a basement or I was in a basement at least um and yeah it was uh put together with um duct tape hopes and dreams I mean we this so me just kind of take a time machine back to the late 90s and in the um you know the concept of what the internet was and how we were trying to leverage this new technology um to reach customers around the world our one of our first customers and we’re in the United States um was a multinational in Europe and so how do you you know so you could do the traditional surveys where you print out boxes of surveys and you ship them and then people do them and you bring them back we three people were not operating in that way right so how do we leverage so I think the first assessment I wrote was a pearl script that dumped assessment data into a text file because there were no databases I mean the internet was the Wild Wild West you know most people was the internet right chat rooms chat room MC MSN yeah right you remember those days um and you know you know and I wrote kind of there was no kind of um software as a service layer so everything was downloaded to a desktop you know where I put together a very rudimentary uh initial system to process that data that we collect and then to try and figure out how do we create outputs all of it was very new in terms of like you know Soup To Nuts of data collection processing analytic report outputs um compared to what we can do today it’s it’s it’s a completely different world um but a lot of it was just a lot of Ingenuity a lot of trying a lot of experimenting I mean there weren’t books because people were making it up on the fly all right so so uh started from a pearl script then I’m guessing then as time evolved it went into a Windows software and kind of built together that so it was all you also or you then you know part of my team or well yeah so I was I was just smart enough to know I need to hire smarter people and so I’ve been blessed to have a really great team and and then when we eventually found you guys to add you um to our group to help us out to be even greater but uh yeah it kind of progressed into uh we were working in a in a Unix environment at least on the server side of things and then um um yeah then then kind of java you know kind of and started to mature to to where it was more than a kind of a gimmicky fun thing to do and you could start to put Enterprise Solutions together and so that’s when it really we really kind of Leverage technology because it went from a kind of a client server AR architecture to more of a software as a service because we are all remote so the you know remote work is not a a new thing for us postco um you know I’ve been working remote for 27 years and so we have people scattered uh across the United States and then also a couple of people in the UK so having a distributed architecture has always been part of our um kind of system yeah okay that’s nice so how did you guys used to do conference calls before zoom and WebEx Andis I I have to say it was um I we were one of the first early adopters of Skype um when that so I’m probably showing my age hopefully every some someone on the podcast knows what Skype is um you know and um yeah that was that was kind of our early video conferencing kind of app and interesting um before then I mean I still remember the days when we had to travel taking the list of dialup numbers of the city I’m going to be in you know yeah that’s not the problem anymore yeah that’s true that’s true I’m just showing my age here everyone’s like what I know dialup I’ve been through dialup it’s fine I’ve been through dialup I’ve been through AMC’s I’ve through I’ve been through msn’s uh and then Skype as well the Skype isn’t that old Skype is decent I mean Zoom did disrupt the industry but Skype is decent right so you’re good yeah so I mean again the Technologies how we view technology as really as the enabling kind of foundation to allow us not only to kind of it’s not working remotely as as a nice perk but how do we find the right people that is for our business and it’s not constrained by a geographic circle of commuting time right so we can find somebody in the UK we can find somebody you know in in any part of the us and as we leverage the technology both in Communications for like Zoom calls for example or whatever people who use Microsoft teams um and then also through the the technical platforms by which we do work so that we don’t have to be in the same shared physical space we can be in the shared virtual space and so that’s to us a real kind of blessing and and and something that we really do appreciate try and take advantage of because that helps our business it’s not just the nice oh I can kind of work from home my commutes 30 seconds down the hall is we can find the right people yeah that’s really helpful for us yeah not to mention also you know travel is reduced because I can have a a meeting in the morning in London and a meeting in Sydney at night and working Cent absolutely and not to get on yeah that’s true you can you can really see the impact uh you know this kind of technology has made in in the overall working so I know when we started a few years back you we had this old kind of slightly outdated technology system and that you were using what kind of impact did you I mean how how do you think did that how did that impact your business at that time and what prompted to you guys to think that hey we kind of need to modernize it take it to let’s say newer Technologies newer better user experiences and everything what were the major points that uh you know you felt that they were because of this technology or outdated technology right right so the the platform that you know you’re helping us kind of you know revamp um was our first initiative into a truly kind of software service kind of a web web platform and so those were at the time very Cutting Edge Technologies 15 16 whatever years ago when we kind of launched it I think it maybe been longer than that now what I have learned and through the process of kind of re rebuilding the new system and kind of thinking about how we better manage this is kind of a concept that we we have a phrase that we use like how do you Bo boil a frog you turn up the heat slowly right if you turn up too fast the Frog jumps out well from a technology perspective what we’ve learned is that we’ve kind of boiled our technology slowly allowing kind of kind of uh forget what the with a technical term that that you guys often use technical debt yeah build as we build functionality or or or technology evolves we kept the same system for a a very long time we’ve got our money’s worth out of that for sure but the price that we’ve paid is because we’ve gotten used to the workaround we got used to it being a little slower because it’s happened gradually over time if you were to look at it as a fresh perspective going wow there are lots of workarounds there are lot of inefficiencies there’s some slowness now in the system versus what it was that would be unacceptable we got used to it so we kind of boiled the Frog very slowly technically and got used to things that we probably should not have tolerated a little bit longer so now we’re paying a little bit more attention um to that second don’t ask the question hey is it working ask the question like what are you are there workarounds or there inefficiencies are the things that you’re doing that you know if we eliminate would it make your day quicker more efficient effective easier so it kind of boils down to how your uh how your team and your employees kind of experience have that experience using the software so a lot of times maybe when you go down you talk to somebody and say I have to do that ex thing and he or she kind of that person describes a series of steps and you’re thinking wow so it takes you about you know 6 hours 8 hours just to get this done and why didn’t you to you know raise this or something and they like just figured out a way to solve it I have a story I I remember and I I tell this there’s um this was few years ago and and we had a a calendar kind of uh process to organize some scheduling for for client engagements and um one of the people that worked here uh she said oh by the way could you take a look at this because it wasn’t working for some reason or and whatever I was like oh yeah no problem took maybe 5 minutes to do some reconfiguration to reconnect something and like oh here it goes I’m like how long have you been like it’s not work oh I figured out a way to do it manually it hasn’t worked for like 10 months but I haven’t been bother I didn’t want to bother anybody you know because I I had to work around and but since you were here I thought I’d asked so that was a real like I wish you 10 months ago what could I have saved you in time yeah imagine that a conversation that we often try and have again it’s not does things work or you have a work around it’s you know are we working e effectively are we efficient in this are there ways for us to improve your not just your productivity so I can squeeze more work out of you but there’s stuff that we shouldn’t have to tolerate yeah right I mean it just gives you to think right so it’s not necessarily that hey I’m really counting the hours it’s more like okay this is done you have like three four hours so you have some extra time to think on hey what can I do to learn more do something better and just just frees up your mind right so that’s I think that’s the goal yeah did you guys ever face issues um serving your clients with an older te Tech or that didn’t okay we got we got a little we got a little bit into that as well that’s um yeah it’s uh so in the industry that we are in it’s not I wouldn’t say it’s not considered a technical industry in terms of like you have the shiny newest app shiny you know technical widget we’re on the people side we’re on the softer kind of working and through culture sides of things so we had a mindset for a little while in terms of well we can kind of get away with not having the latest and greatest shiny system um and again we let that slip was true to a certain degree because that’s not the main selling point um but there are expectations of functionality of presentation of ease of use of you know oh I should be able to log in I mean how many organizations do we interface now that don’t have some type of login portal where you can check your account nothing right yeah so there are expectations in the marketplace that we are now also having conversations like what are the expectations we don’t have to be Leading Edge of you know we don’t have to have VR goggles right that’s not our business and we need to have a way of that customers can get the information they need quickly and effectively right um interface that’s intuitive and modern and easy to use yeah yeah and small things like yeah and small things like hey I don’t need to create another account and then remember the password versus kind of gets connected with your one place one sign on and these are very small things that that kind of add to the overall setup as well so yeah that’s that’s yeah when that and that kind of speaks to this technical kind of creep that over time we frankensteined all these different systems that you guys have helped us unfr Frankenstein um where we did have a couple of different logins because we just kind of built these siloed things and customers expect a more seamless experience seamless experience yeah that’s we got we got we learned a lesson in that no that’s and that’s actually how you evolve I think a lot of the Frog example is actually perfectly beautifully put if you wait too long it’s also a problem if you do it too fast it’s also a problem so you need to kind of find the right balance the right temperature uh you know how much you can do and how because this this is it’s not a small transition from because people are so used to using the old system and I know it took us a lot of time to actually convince them that hey and it was more of a like we shutting down the old system you have literally no other choice just to you know start using the new system so that also kind of is a is a transition in its own s so let’s say by contrast if you imagine um and I know when you have when you have Legacy with Legacy systems a lot of problem is also not only technical debt outdated UI and overall experience lacking but a lot of problem from the data side as well because you have these individual silos which have data which which which kind of not talk with each other so you can never really have a look at true picture so what I mean now considering where we are what kind of impact do you think that this data consolidation or putting being able and and withi also coming in and we’ll talk about this a little bit further down how do you think that kind of impacts the overall or how does it that help right so that’s also a very big case of of of uh of deciding to kind of transition from a legacy to you know more modern system yeah yeah so I think you know when when thinking about this and then I think we’re in in a period of human history where there’s a kind of exponentially increasing amount of data thrown at people you know we are not we’re not an Information Age anymore it’s a information overload age I agree and yeah um it’s coming from all kinds of sources so they’re two kind of main tent poles that I think are important in considering this complex situation you know one is trusting the data right and I’m not talking about misinformation trusting I’m talking about you’re coming from different sources what’s the veracity behind it is it timely is it accurate you know you have different parts of your organization adding inputs in different systems where do you trust that as the source of truth right um that’s a conversation that’s the conversation we’ve had in our organization where you know maybe come from a customer team as well they might have some you know information on on a client engagement versus you know sales or marketing or something else where’s that source of Truth where’s the trust around it so when we build and integrate the things you know that’s got to be built in to to Foster that trust so that when I’m looking at the screen I’m looking at is it the right thinking yes yeah it’s it’s not it’s not some story being told right yeah and then the second thing is you know what’s what’s the information that’s not interesting I want the information that’s useful and that’s another conversation that we have there’s lots of information I’ve seen thr around I’m like that’s interesting it’s not useful yeah I mean it’s good to know but what do I really do with it I mean okay it’s there’s so much information I don’t have time for inter I I need I need useful I need what is it what’s going to be actionable what’s going to be help us making decisions execute in our strategy and to discern the difference between useful information and interesting information is an important conversation um and there’s different levels of usefulness within your organization so you know the the data sets that I need to see might be for a specific kind of context versus like my marketing director you know or you know you know my it guys in terms of like how how the systems are running but I often see in conversations or in me reads people bringing interesting oh we had this much engagement I’m like that’s nice but why what’s the context what’s the reason around it how do we connect and how do we promote that information as part of the system design is a is an important conversation a lot of times when you actually get the right picture and you look at useful data there’s a lot of strategic thinking that happens right so it kind of there’s this uh it opens your mind to oh okay this is something that I I I probably didn’t know ever and now you you all of a sudden you have all these ideas coming in and um you know you’re able to strategically think that what do I do and you know how do I move forward what do the next 12 months look like I mean we when we looked at our I had this problem of having the right data every time I opened up you know our data and I was like this is life right so you had to go back and then you had to do this manual counting and then you should come back and then we build the system around and there were a lot of things that oh we’ve all of a sudden we realize we’ve done a lot of these kind of projects so you know and that’s a revelation and you know you start moving towards that so that definitely helps so I mean what how do you think what kind of I know and and and with with you guys I believe data is actually everything because based on that you figure out that hey how big or small of a gap is between what the stakeholders want and what the what the employee really think the culture is yeah yeah it’s um so kind of the corollary to to is it useful um to you know what degree is it it accurate not from a trust perspective but from a completeness perspective um so that it is actionable um and so we ALS the other phrase that I I like to use is like there are times the data we need to be accurate enough to land on the moon so we need Precision because it’s critical and there’s data that’s like I just need to be able to describe the Moon and so to understand the difference you know so that we don’t get caught up and everything has to be to like five decimal points which can B you down sometimes I do need five decimal points where you I do need a a level of of accuracy and completeness and sometimes it’s like that’s not necessary in this context and to know the difference between the two so working with customers got to trust it right it has to be useful there level of completeness and accuracy because we’re giving them recommendations that are impacting their business right but there’re going to be some context where it’s like no we just need the general Trend or the general kind of indicator toward something to get a sense less yeah yeah so I love you bring up quot so there’s something that I like to use in my or and I usually say to people hey In God We Trust rest all others bring data yeah that’s it right so absolutely uh I mean so yeah so I think with data becomes does become a critical point so just wondering um and I actually wanted to ask this before but it just came to my mind what was the turning point where you guys you you know kind of decided that hey we need to modernize this we need to update our technology is any incident happened or it was a series of incidents or was there a special turning point or it was just you know think that’s a really great great question I I don’t think there was a true kind of aha moment or meeting I I I think my natural DNA is how can we continue to be better how can we continue to kind of meet the needs of our customers um and so that’s to always kind of a driving Focus for me to see to look at the pery to look at the the the Horizon and and try and understand the tension between between you what we have works and then what we could do to make things better for our stakeholders so for us you know we never got caught up in the app world it just didn’t fit our business everybody and their brother was coming up with an app for their company and I saw some par apps and I saw some apps that are like I don’t know why you would build this except for someone asks you do you have an app you get to say yes yes yeah yeah okay so we we never went that route it never fit our model there was no customer driving need behind it so I I I think for us it’s more of what are our customer expectations what’s that next thing that makes might make them go wow this is neat thank you for doing that or this is giving me better insights into the operations of my business um or allows us to respond quicker so there are actual use cases that I mean you noticed over time and you can because a lot of times business so your core business might be something else but it primarily to deliver that successfully it’s very dependent or highly dependent on the technology stacks and one of the problems that I’ve seen in a lot of organizations they tend don’t tend to find people who can actually support the software as well so you know you you wouldn’t find a lot of cobalt developers or classic ASP guys who are willing to work on such when there’s so much newer technology and you ask them that hey you don’t find good talent in those places so that I’ve also seen that as a pivoting um kind of realization for for for organizations that hey I’m I’m finding it hard to find talent and all I have is one or two people who you know who are as old probably as a software that that danger so but yeah I mean unfortunately I I I could I could confess the fact that I have programmed in cobal so um I could be one of those dinosaurs roaming around um doing that kind of work but that’s you know that’s that’s an important piece is like technology is evolving and it’s it’s a delicate balance you don’t want to be on the bleeding edge and investing in something that’s not ready for for Enterprise and you don’t want to be left behind in terms of like yeah this is it’s going to be too expensive to maintain yeah you know and and there’s a you know not to to throw any kind of particular company under a bus but there was an airline that hit uh some weather issues and they’re known for a you know being a their culture is kind of a leading brand proposition for them they’re you know very famously known for being the fun Airlines to fly and all that there’s a weather event that threw their reservation systems and some certain things out of whack and it took him a week to recover because their old it systems right were siloed and you know not connected and you know weren’t efficient and weren’t you know so they paid a huge price you know you know they are The Darlings of culture which is in our industry so that’s how it’s more top of mind for me they’re always the poster child of hey look at the culture of this organization is great it is you know great we we we really applaud what they do there and they’ve maybe neglected made choices around how they want to keep infrastructure uh up to some type of Industry not standard but uh modernization uh to handle the complexities of major weather event that threw things out of whack and and they paid the price for that um both in Customer Loyalty both in penalties um from you know regulatory a brand reputation brand reputation yeah absolutely yeah um you know so I think that has to be part of that conversation of you know yes we want to obviously promote uh a brand of being a great airline to fly you can trust us in all those great culture things but the underlying thing is well hopefully they keep up with mechical yeah but then also their it their reservation systems and their and their routing of their pilots and their and their flight attendance yeah so what what kind of advice you yourself going through this entire transition what do you think what what kind of advice would you like to give to let’s say other Business Leaders that a who are kind of struggling with the transition and making the decision what could help them how could they frame the thought in their head kind of reflecting on our experience at BBC and you know thinking about your question and when you’re looking at these larger systems especially the Legacy ones and I and I’m going to go back you know 30 years when I was working on Mainframe Cobalt systems which I know are still working right they’re still because they’re so monolithic and they’re so embedded in the you know agencies they look at like what’s the cost of making these shifts the disruption is going to impact my short results and I think that’s a dilemma that a lot of um Executives face and I think the problem is is that the change doesn’t happen until disaster as as with anything in life right yeah in your personal life or as or leading an organization and I think the discipline really comes down to it’s like I have to think longterm yeah there’s going to be maybe some short-term pain um in doing this any Change is Gonna never go 100% smoothly there’s going to be some short-term um challenge in this and expense but you have to balance the long-term success against that and I think um that’s that’s often the challenge of senior Executives when they have short-term result pressures they keep kicking that can down the road and and can you have the honest conversations with your shareholders your board or whomever you’re working with to say I know it’s working now but it’s been a while since we’ve done something in this right how do we mitigate so that we aren’t in the news right so we keep our reputation so that we aren’t fine we’re in a regulatory environment um yeah so so that our maybe our maintenance costs will be cheaper down the road because we’re not having to hire the super specialty people that only work on this technology anymore I’m a hammer salesman everything’s a nail it goes back to culture like What’s the culture of that executive team of management team so what were the let’s say the biggest challenges that you felt um you faced or during this transitioning from a legacy to a modern system what were the top two three things that come to your mind so none of these challenges were new you know I was even speaking to um someone earlier this week saying you know going okay here’s what where where we are I’m like I’m okay we know this is a process right so one of the bigger things is you get used to the way things were done and you bring in something new now you have to learn the new thing yeah you have to put un and then yeah you know and so you often hear the phrase well it didn’t work like that in the old system you’re right that’s why it’s called the old system we’re doing something hopefully more efficient U something maybe that the customer is going to help or you know maybe if you try this and look a different way maybe this is better for you or your team so there’s the old way of doing things versus the new way of doing things challenge the change management process nothing new in that right um and so I think it’s important sometimes in those conversations to kind of zoom out and just recognize for what it is as opposed to getting caught up in the emotion of that and said we know change is is is difficult for some more than others but this is where we’re going and how can we make that smoother so I think that’s the biggest issue um I think the other one too and just depends upon the size of your organization is building it while operating the old and managing priorities so um you know we have a smaller kind of internal team that’s you know doing kind of both and so they’re juggling two different types of priorities running the old which is serving the customers and running the business and operations but then also contributing to the design or the user acceptance or the you know whatever part of the plan of the new right and not slowing that down and so there’s a tension in that that and there’s no answer there’s I mean if someone has an answer let’s write the book and you know please I’d like to be a part of that because that’s the the magic button right in my experience you have to manage that tension again that takes some in my experience it’s better handled if you can kind of step back a little bit and not always get caught up into the the details yes the details are important but from a managing the project perspective to understand that tension is going to exist and there are times when we’re going to get it right and there are times when we’re not going to get it right um but that’s part of the process so those are probably off the top of my head the two Universal ones that I know I’ve we’ve always seen so right so I mean it’s just to summarize it’s basically the challenge of making sure that our people start using the new software and get comfortable with that so it’s it’s basically change management right so you have to get comfortable right so yeah yeah so it’s just it’s more like hey I have to get used to it it’s it’s understanding that the change and uh I think that’s absolutely right a lot of I mean I I do know for a fact that we had to write these scripts where we could um update data from older system to the new system because there were still two groups of people using it and then when they used to go to the new one they were like we don’t have our data over here so we can’t use it we’re going back old and we had to you know solve this problem now you have your data so you don’t have any excuse to go back so yeah it makes sense when you think of like the stories of the old explorers that went across the Atlantic they would burn the ships when they got to the beach we’re not going back no so all right so moving on to the and I think uh no podcast can be complete without talking about the new kid on the Block AI in general right so what’s your thought on that what’s your thoughts on the future of AI technology how do you see that coming into play and yeah yeah yeah no that’s that’s that is the new kid on the Block and um I think I mentioned earlier around you know The Fad versus where is the trend or the kind of general direction you know whereas we didn’t feel an app was in our business model or something appropriate for us AI is a different technology and so we’re looking at that very closely and and I think our challenge right now is identifying the right not just the right window of maturity of the technology uh because it is advancing so quickly and um we don’t want to be ahead of the wave and we don’t want to be behind it right we want to figure out where it fits for us and our customers uh and our internal stakeholders and then you know two is like how do we leverage it appropriately so um both from a perspective of like where does it fit our business model you know we can use it for very simple things of like help me write you know memos or emails or papers or things to help me analyze data right but have to be that again do we trust it is it reliable in terms of its accuracy is it hallucinating and all the things that we know in a quickly evolving technology we have to weigh in okay I use it for helping me write papers and certain things um I’ve even asked um when we do kind of videos or we do interviews I’ve had it actually help interview me to create content which I think is a really kind of a a a neat concept right if I’m stuck on a block I’ll ask it to interview me to pull out the information but then I use it and I massage it and I and I work it and I and I verify the material where we’re still evaluating is the reliability using it in a customer setting where we’re giving advice to very serious people making serious decisions we want it to be accurate it’s got to be that five decimal places of reliable right um and so that’s where we’re like all how do we want to weave this in we’ll use it get used to it what’s our policy you know is it you know a lot of people say oh my AI overlords are going to replace me our position our policy here BBC is no it’s to supplement your work so that you can do the more fun stuff like no one enjoys writing a memo or a paper of some variety if it can do 80% of that for you you get to do the fun other things right so how does make your day easier and better how can you better make that difference going back to our culture how can we maintain you know that sense of caring for each other we’re not looking to have robots replace people because we’re in a people business how does it help us execute in a business right so there are lots of different vectors that we evaluated on and you know I know I use it certain members of my team you know use it from a uh research or kind of a authoring perspective some testing the waters from an analytical perspective and you know for us you know when we find that right mix then we’ll got embed it a little bit more uh into some of the client facing product stuff um when we feel that it’s going to offer the right reliability and Truth um because our brand and our reputation is parental right in the work that we do yeah so I think you absolutely nailed it um and I I I think I 100% agree with you that it’s not going to replace people or it’s going to replace programmers or analytics or Consultants or whoever it is it’s really to it’s an assistant that’s on 247 uh that uh doesn’t get tired that has a much you know greater span of thinking but at the end of the day it’s an assistant that I have to reign in U you know like you would put it on a horse and just have it focused and you have to review what output it produces so that’s that’s I think that’s going to be the critical thing the other thing and I was when I was playing around with it what I noticed was that the amount of information that it can process and give you as a human you it’s very hard to process I mean if you’re writing a paper of five 5,000 words you get to it step by step or stage by stage right so you think of the outline you think of the first th 2,000 analytic words and you then you arrive a certain conclusion that hey this it what I feels like that the culture is and whatever you know and you take your time in getting to that conclusion if you rely on AI it just spits out the output in three minutes and then you still still have to spend two days to absorb all of that information right so you because you’re not as fast as as the so yeah I think that’s uh that’s where it’s headed towards though I do get scary U you know I haven’t I mean I I often tell to say this to people that I haven’t watched a good AI movie right so all of the movies are are are bad ai ai end up ruling the world destroying the world uh concluding that humans are all bad that’s yeah yeah yeah I mean for us where I I think we kind of try and leverage it more is what you talked about is because we have there’s a complexity of of in a of information and in the volume of information my experience in how it it kind of helps my day is simplifying and theming and and making sense of the patterns within that volume of information where the human brain just cannot get its kind of virtual arms around that and to to leverage technology to help you with that so it’s a it’s a supplement to who I am and who we are versus a replacement yeah that’s true that’s to me where I see the future and hopefully it’s not so aware that it it doesn’t doesn’t require us so I’d like to kind of before I wrap up I’d love to hear if there’s any final you know uh advice or or a thing that you would like to add or a comment or anything on on you know organizations U that are that that want to let’s say modernize their culture and our technology from both perspective and then you know we can kind of wrap up from that ah wow that’s that’s a big invitation so I guess the best I have it in the spur of the moment you know kind of you know is this you know when thinking about your organization at least from the length we like to think about is you know it is organizations are human Centric it’s it’s people you take the people out of it it’s there there’s nothing there yet right right so when you’re thinking about technology who are the stakeholders in that system and then how can you leverage that technology to create that better dat for that stakeholder right um you know and that’s that’s the end of it I think there’s a lot of conversation sometimes it’s like oh there’s a new thing out let’s do the new thing and find a reason to do it to me it’s a little bit backwards like what’s the need how can we make the lives of our staff better oh here’s a technology that can help us you know leverage that versus here’s a technology how do we squeeze it into our organization because it’s cool or it’s trending right right so that’s I guess you know I’m not saying in a position to offer anyone advice except for this is my experience and and how we think about techn and Leever leveraging it in in BBC right right so yeah so don’t go to the gold rush really think through how it impacts you what is the use case what do I need to invest in terms of time money people everything and then and then figure out and decide and it’s not that hard as it looks the biggest change or the biggest thing is that we have to make sure that a team is part of that entire process they’re on boarded they they know it’s change and yes we have to get uh used to being a little comfortable but being comfortable at the same time right so being comfortable with being uncomfortable so yeah that sounds good all right okay uh thank you for your valuable Insight it was really fun talking and uh good talking to you great thank you thanks for having me [Music]