Stacey Sharp - Beyond the Command Line, building effective information systems.

In this episode of Forged by Design, we sit down with Stacey Sharp, Infrastructure Engineer and Director of Information Systems, whose passion for technology began at just six years old programming on a TRS-80 computer. With more than three decades of experience in IT, Stacey shares how the industry has evolved—from early personal computers and Linux to cloud computing and modern manufacturing environments where 24/7 uptime is mission-critical.

Throughout the conversation, Stacey discusses the realities of disaster recovery, the importance of disciplined troubleshooting, when organizations should build custom solutions versus buying commercial software, and the lessons learned from leading large-scale cloud migrations. He also explains why documentation is one of the most overlooked yet valuable practices in IT and offers practical advice for the next generation of technology professionals. Whether you're an IT leader, engineer, or simply fascinated by the evolution of technology, this episode is packed with real-world insights from someone who has spent a lifetime building, solving, and innovating.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Welcome to the Forge by Design Podcast. This is your host, Daniel Badigel. As always, thank you so much for all your support. You can find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and of course our YouTube channel, Forge by Design. We have an amazing guest today. I always use that word amazing, but definitely amazing guest today. 30 years of experience in information systems, director of IT, among many things, cloud serving, cloud computing, uh Linux. We're going to have a great conversation regarding infrastructure and all those changes that have happened throughout, I think, many decades. So very interesting. Help me welcome Mr. Stacey Sharp. How are you, sir? Doing well, thank you. So grateful that you made the time out of your busy schedule to be with us. We have some history together. We've we've shared. He was before this uh this program, he was saying that he previously read some of my emails. We uh we worked together uh quite uh a couple of years ago. I will say uh maybe a couple of decades.

SPEAKER_01 1:17

Over a decade, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:19

It's been some time. It's been some time, but uh our interactions have been always uh grateful, um, very professional, and uh you have been definitely a mentor in the IT world. Uh this is nothing, nothing new to you. You've uh uh you are a pillar in many of the companies that I know regarding uh maintaining their infrastructure, uh their uh information systems, cloud computing, and so many other things that have allowed many organizations to run successfully 24-7. So uh I'm I'm I'm sure that if I have a networking issue, I know who to call. I've got you on speed down now. There you go. Absolutely. So you started off uh with the Tandy Radio Shack computer back in the day of the 2080.

SPEAKER_01 2:06

We used to call it the Trash 80, that was a couple of things.

SPEAKER_00 2:08

The Trash 80. One of the things that uh was very astounding to me, because I had to do I had to go back and research because I was trying to remember the style of computer that there was with maybe a 20, a 12-inch monitor plugged into a cassette cassette uh mechanism, right? How in the world had a basic software system that you were able to customize. What were you doing at the age of what six, seven messing around with TR8 system?

SPEAKER_01 2:35

So to get give you a little backstory, my dad has been in IT since 1969. Oh, that makes a lot of sense now. So one year for Christmas, I think I was I think I was six that year. He brought home, we could we got up that morning, you know, Christmas tree, whatever, and there's a the TV has this weird thing on the screen. And what it was is a little computer, and we could type in our name. Yes, and it knew all kinds of facts about us, and it blew me away. I was hooked right away. And so, what it was he had written a program that knew all about us. So I was hooked on this thing. It's uh it's written in BASIC, and basic is still around. Is it it's still around in different different forms? But you would program line by line and you saved on cassette tapes, and it took about as long as it would to play an entire album back then.

SPEAKER_00 3:21

It took this this is a cassette, this is a this is a cassette cassette.

SPEAKER_01 3:25

Regular cassette.

SPEAKER_00 3:25

Was it one cassette, two cassettes? Well, it was it was it?

SPEAKER_01 3:28

Probably one per program. One per program was wild. But to get programs, there was no internet. You waited for magazines to come into mail, and you get pages of this stuff, like computer trend magazines, and you would type it line by line.

SPEAKER_00 3:41

Okay, so you the the the magazines had the code?

SPEAKER_01 3:44

They had the programs and release code for you. So I had I wrote Battleship.

unknown 3:48

My own.

SPEAKER_01 3:48

You wrote all on it. That's amazing. And if you mess up one line, correct.

SPEAKER_00 3:53

Yeah, one period, one dash, four slash. It was oh man, that would that would have been exciting because just you were the anticipation of getting the magazine to to do this, right? That's that's outstanding.

SPEAKER_01 4:04

When I got my comic books, that was my thing, but when I got the computer programming magazines, I was truly nerding out.

SPEAKER_00 4:11

I think uh the first time obviously I've never programmed. Uh, I remember um I did start it off my college years, uh, studying networking at Augusta Tech. Uh, got a Microsoft's uh Microsoft's uh certified uh uh associate degree. And I did study A, A, server, 2000 server, what back back in the day. And um then part of the curriculum I had to take programming classes. And when I just to know the logic. Just to know the logic. But when I started to get into the AS400 mainframes, the visual basics, and some other man, it was so intimidating. And in my there was the you know, the infinite loops and this and that. Mind mind cannot uh handle because it's literally a language. It is, it is a language, and uh it's it's just like learning Spanish, and then the next semester you're learning Portuguese. And though there's some similarities, right? Right, it's definitely a different world. So one of the uh professors uh told me stick with something, stick with one language, master it, master it, and then off of that, once you get seniority, then para at parallel, learn how to to uh develop the skills to of another language.

SPEAKER_01 5:26

Right. My biggest problem now, which we'll I know we'll get into later, is the way they teach kids early programming, it pushes more people away. Okay. I had a kid that wanted to learn to program. He Minecraft was a thing, he wanted to learn Java, and so he took Java in high school, and the way they taught it was terrible. He showed me his books. I'm like, there's a much easier way. But it kind of pushed him away for a long time. He didn't want to do it. Oh wow so you need you need the right teacher and the right language.

SPEAKER_00 5:51

Oh, that's amazing. You know, my ex my exposition or my exposure to computers was the first that the I think it was like the Apple II computer, and it had this massive, I want to say it was a uh a five point five point twenty five floppy, not not a hard disk, uh five and a quarter uh floppy disk that you inserted, and then the there was uh Apple IIE. Apple IIE. That was the first computer I hacked. But that's the first computer you hacked. Well, uh let's not go there, but yes. So and then that one had two two hard drives or two floppies, two drives. And then of course the the then Macintosh came out with the three and a quarter uh hard drive with the spinning disc.

SPEAKER_01 6:34

It was still a floppy, you know?

SPEAKER_00 6:36

It was still a floppy, you know, but I can't tell you that you know, I how much money I spent at Walmart buying the floppy cases that you know you can hold 30 discs. Right. I still have a couple. You still have that? Oh my god, I I don't I don't even think I had that. I had so much information. A lot of it was not photos because there was not a not a not enough capacity, but uh a lot of documents.

SPEAKER_01 6:57

I'll tell you the funniest thing. So where that that original three and a half inch floppy survives today is in our infamous save icon. So everybody knows the save icon, every program you have on a computer, it's that that floppy disk. So I was cleaning out my garage going through stuff, and I this is several years ago, and I pulled out some and was gonna see what I had. And one of my kids looked at it and goes, Dad, I didn't know you 3D printed a save icon. Oh wow, oh my god, that was hilarious! Have a seat, Sud What eat a tallness.

SPEAKER_00 7:25

Well, so what you had a passion, your dad was in was in IT. Um this this passion obviously stuck with you. Is when you were in high school, did you see yourself entering college uh wanting to pursue an IT career, or was that uh something that you had on the sidelines? Maybe you wanted to pursue something else, but life life and experience and curiosity drew you to information systems.

SPEAKER_01 7:48

So knowing that this is how computers worked, back then computers were big, you know, the personality. Yeah, remember that. So my first degree that I pursued was electronic engineering. Second was computer science. I wanted to build computers, I wanted to be the guy soldering everything, you know, I wanted to build them. And then I realized very quickly, within I mean less than five years, the infrastructure of how computers are built started to get very complicated, and it wasn't as simple as a person with a soldering iron anymore. Okay, so but I I've I've always felt a passion for IT. Sure. It's always been there.

SPEAKER_00 8:27

Yeah, I tried it, Stacey. I did try to assemble and solder. Of course, you go through the courses of soldering and and all that. Uh I remember crimping Ethernet cable and cabling and the color coding and stuff like that. Uh, not successful, not not successful. But just want to throw it out there that uh it was not it was really not my forte uh as far as that. That's that's why I transitioned to programming robots because it was it was a different type of platform. Still programming, still programming, still programming. So I went to Dayton, Ohio, and uh there was a motorman uh robots right uh company called uh Millsco Manufacturing gave me the opportunity. And uh, you know, so anyways, that that's that's another avenue. 30 years of IT, uh you've seen a lot of changes in technology, a lot of platforms in technology, especially around the CSRA and abroad. What do you think uh has been the the greatest shift? You know, I noted down, of course, that the 1970s there was the commercial microprocessor that came out, and then of course the 1980s, the World Wide Web, uh the 1990s, the open source operating system, Linux, which you are a guru in. Of course, the the 2010 was uh the cloud computing infrastructure. And what what comes to mind when you looking at these major leaps in technology that has left you uh you know curious about you know 30 years you go through a few different paradigm shifts.

SPEAKER_01 9:52

So cassette tapes. Okay I've saved stuff on real-to-reel uh tapes, so classic, classic real to real. Um had a data management job I worked with my dad, and we had to take stuff off of bank records that were stored on those and put them on actual computers. So just watching, I think one of the biggest things for me has been how we store our data. So we talk about you know the size of floppy disks. I still have an unopened box of eight-inch floppy disks. Nobody knows what those are. There's eight, five and a quarter, three and a half. But you know, even the size of our thumb drives and you know, micro SD cards and stuff like that that fit on your thumbnail, that's one thing. But I remember when a megabyte was a ton of space. Sure. You know, Bill Gates is famously saying, because he was asked by IBM, they're building a computer around him. How much memory does a computer need? And he famously said, no more than 640 kilobytes ever. Well, I guess everything he was thinking about cloud computing. They they built such a small computer space, and now we're looking at terabytes. So looking at big data, as they call it now, how much we store, how much we collect, how much information, to me, I think some of the biggest things that have that have floored me, you know, has got to be storage, you know, because memory has stayed about the same, it just gets bigger. Processors just started replicating and making multiple cores. Correct. But it's storage that has changed. To me, the big change between a spinning hard drive, which we some of us we call it a rush drive. Correct. So from a spinning hard drive to a solid state device, and now to NVMe, the really small ones that go in your laptops and your computers. Sure. I'm waiting to see what's next.

SPEAKER_00 11:33

Yeah, absolutely, especially in the in the gaming uh industry, you know, uh just myself, you know, I've I've had you know, you start to collect all these laptops, right? And uh, and some of the you add more RAM, more memory, whatnot. And then uh back in the day, uh I was talking to my producer that you know, one terabyte used to be like 80 bucks the world if you got it. If you have one terabyte, and but now one terabyte, two terabytes of memory can cost you three, four hundred dollars because it there's a high demand for people to start downloading all this information and putting it in on external hard drives and whatnot, uh, so you won't lose those those photos, those videos, and whatnot, especially on the podcasting side. I'm gonna have to get put this on the cloud somewhere because you know I can't say monthly to keep it there. Uh yeah, yeah. Somebody, somebody's got it to to analyze. We transfers got all my all my videos and what that's the next paradigm shift.

SPEAKER_01 12:28

It's one thing that I have seen uh change and not to jump too far ahead, but it used to be when you buy a computer, it's your computer. You buy your software, whether it be Windows or Office or whatever you need, it's yours. You keep it until it's no longer supported. Now everything is a subscription, it's software as a service. So the subscription model is the most common way because companies realize that once you buy it, I'm not making any more money off of you. Correct. So now they have a model that we are all inundated with. Like we subscribe to everything. Storage for your pictures, that's a cloud subscription. Want to use office, that's a cloud subscription. That's the next paradigm. That's where we are right now as far as who's making money.

SPEAKER_00 13:09

Yeah, so privacy is less sometimes less private because if you want privacy, that's another subscription.

SPEAKER_01 13:15

It's either private or it's built on your own proper your own stuff at home and you run the risk of it being lost in a fire or something.

SPEAKER_00 13:22

So from a um a company standpoint, of of course, uh the introduction of computers, uh, you know, typically back back then line managers or office managers, functional managers are the were the only ones that had computer systems. Now more and more people are using uh tablets, like for example, for auditing, uh, for quality management system auditing, later process auditing, anything lean six sigma six sigma for gamble walks and kinds and events and what you can do. Information as you get what you go, uh, with the uh evolution of scanners to scan barcodes to update the inventory, RFID technology, the chip technology to update your inventory, keep track of movements of raw materials, whip what the systems and people behind the scenes uh before a software monitoring all these logistics. You know, we didn't have that back in the day. It was more so, again, the office managers had some sort of computer, you know, and usually a hard drive and everything was stored there locally. If you lost your laptop or you lost your, you know, you you spilled your coffee on your on your desk desktop, that was it. You know, that that was it, and it happened to me once. And it happened to me once. I have to confess, I won't say what company, but it did, it did, it did happen to me. Well, well, now how do you how do you navigate uh the fact that uh as a director of IT, uh people are are wanting more and more accessibility and access to server, to cloud computer basing, to instant information uh on these platforms.

SPEAKER_01 14:59

So you've already hit it. So what it is is people need access to their information instantly and all the time and everywhere. So right now, if I need to go and look up an email, I can pull up a phone and spend seconds and I've got my email. I can search by last month, I can go find something instead of having to go back to my office, dig through files, or go through a computer that's sitting there on my desk. People now need access to stuff instantly. And I think that's what's driving people. We're in a we're in a microwave society. We want it now. Yes, and so that's the drive.

SPEAKER_00 15:33

Well, and how much obviously the the more uh computer devices or mobile devices employees have because of their roles and responsibilities, it needs more cloud storage, uh, uh a set of uh a server room. And you know, one of the things that I was looking at uh because I I remember, of course, as you uh as a you as an IT IT director, the bridges, the switches, the the um the uh the firewalls, right? Physical devices that you had to have uh back then it was a T1 line for for storage, and as the years progressed, to my surprise, I you know, I think uh it was it was to come. You know, T1 lines were replaced with uh fiber optic cabling. So uh no knowing that uh as an IT director, uh do how do you look at the infrastructure of a company to say, yes, we have the cloud computing power or computing storage necessary in order to have a successful company?

SPEAKER_01 16:33

Right. So if you've got your stuff in a cloud somewhere, and which by the way, cloud just means somebody else's computer that you're paying for. Sure. In this area, most of them are in Atlanta. Sure. So when all your stuff's up there, you need to have a fast enough internet speed to access it and bring it down to whatever building you're sitting in, whatever your your business is. And if you're walking around the floor doing gimbal walks, doing inspections, trying to check quality documentation, trying to move warehouse management, you have to have a fast internet and a fast Wi-Fi. So everything has to evolve and upgrade almost simultaneously at the same time. So we worked at a place before that went from on-premise servers, which means they were sitting in a room there sucking up air conditioning and electricity, to a cloud system, which we made that migration. And now all of a sudden we had to make sure the internet was fast enough so that we could still access everything we have. Sure. So things do move quicker. You have more data that has to move, and so making sure your network is up to speed and up to network, up to sp up to spec, rather. Sure. To keep up with what your demands are.

SPEAKER_00 17:39

And what about security on the on the cloud based? Oh, yeah, you're waiting for that one. You know, I guess you know, uh I'm gonna be honest, I guess as uh again, I I'm I'm the and a user, I'm not, I'm not part of the the IT department. I'm a functional quality shared manager and so so many other things. As a user, I'm always thinking about is is this inform the cloud? The cloud where? You know, is this uh you know uh the twilight? Does it go to the twilight? So where's the cloud? Where's the cloud? Where's my information going? How is it stored? And how is it audited? I mean, who's what's the what's the privacy there?

SPEAKER_01 18:14

So it's it's kind of wild when you think about so when you start talking about there's more and more devices on the network and there's more wireless devices. To an IT person, we just felt all the hair stand up on the back of her neck because why is that? Well, for two things. One, we have to protect company information, company secrets. That's critical to help this company succeed. That's their trademark, their trade secret. How do you do that? Well, the other part is protecting users from themselves. People click links, they don't think about it, they'll let things in the door. So part of what we have to do is from where the servers sit, full access control. We have to make sure that only the people with permission can get there. Then we look at the devices that the people with permission log into. What endpoint security do we have? Do we have a way to keep someone from trying to get in without it? You've heard of two-factor authentication. I need a password and a fingerprint, or a password and a pass key, or some kind of a some kind of a code. So we have to follow the chain on where people are accessing this information. And a lot of times you see it all the time. You read in the email or read read about emails, there's phishing schemes. People clicked a link that looked real. Office 365 is huge about this because people get a link. I think it came from IT. They click it and log in, and now someone has taken their account. And whoever has it can go up that chain and grab whatever information they were allowed to have. So it's a constant, it's a full-time job for that person.

SPEAKER_00 19:37

Well, you know, as a as as you know, one of the things that I have seen from uh from a shop floor level is that once an employee gets a hold of that guest password and they have access to you know, my phone's not working, it's bad, you know, transmission, I'm inside the building, right? I can't get on, I can't uh access my Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, as you know, how you know and you know I'm not sure if you're able to block it, but um, you know, once once you have that QR code and you scan that guest password, and or visitors come in from other companies and and the same the same thing. Um, you know, that that the the risk of of you know hitting I'm not sure if this terminology is still the tro Trojan horse so or spam. It's still away. Trojans are still a thing.

SPEAKER_01 20:21

Now now we have uh rats, which is a remote access trojan, so they can come in remotely. Correct. Um so one and install the software, install it'll install whatever it wants. If you gave it permission, it takes over your computer. Oh my god. So one of the biggest things now you're talking about different types of Wi-Fi networks. A lot of companies will have their corporate network, which is locked down, very long passwords, certain people get it and they're monitored heavily to see if new devices show up. But guest networks are usually segmented, almost like a DMZ. It's a demilitarized zone. It is outside of your network on purpose. Okay. It may get less resources, it has less permission. And it's monitored, but not strictly. Like we want to make sure that people can connect to access whatever resources they need outside of our network, outside of our structure. The corporate networks need to be able to access what's inside. So that's the guest password. We push that out. And if it starts getting abused, we slow it down or shut it off.

SPEAKER_00 21:17

Okay. So uh going back to that question, how how does um director of IT protect its users? Because then again, the the third party, maybe second party, third party service for firewalls or for protection is cloud-based. Is that is that a correct statement?

SPEAKER_01 21:34

So yeah, to a degree. How is that how is that monitoring? It's usually cloud managed. So they don't have a physical firewall gateway device. There's okay. And so his job is to l sniff everything that comes through. So if it smells bad, it goes back out, you know. So his job is to check everything. And nowadays you'll read in the news all the time, at least in in the tech forums, every major firewall company, and we're talking uh you You know, Naraki, we're talking Fortigate, we're talking SonicWall, yes, uh Cisco, all these guys, uh uh Palo Alto, all these guys have been in the news at least once in the last 12 months of major hacks. Yeah, major hacks. Because people want to go after the gatekeepers. Sure. So they have to stay on top of their game so that we can stay on top of our game. So again, the firewall is your first line of defense. If that's updated, we're good. It's cloud managed, but we keep it here. But again, uh another word, you know, we used to have antivirus software on our computers. We used to have uh malwytes, that was a big one. We used to love it. What about McAfee that keeps packing?

SPEAKER_00 22:33

McAfee's still it'll never die.

SPEAKER_02 22:36

It'll never die.

SPEAKER_00 22:36

Well, I see the pop-up every time. I mean, it's about to expire. I mean, I'm like, I never installed it. It's because you didn't uncheck a box.

SPEAKER_01 22:44

But nowadays, you know, antivirus isn't enough. Sure. Because AI drives virus creation, AI drives virus um destruction. Sure. So now it's called endpoint security. Your device is an endpoint. So there's a software that's running that's doing more than just viruses or virus protection. It's looking at everything. And not to get big words, but checks heuristic scans. It's looking at um all of your ins and outs. It's just trying to make sure everything is copacetic. Like, is this supposed to be here? Not supposed to be here. Sure. Like if you try to go go go to google.com, did you something on your computer go ask for yahoo.com? Like, okay, something went wrong. So that's its job is to really multi-layer security endpoint, midpoint, endpoint, try to find everything.

SPEAKER_00 23:30

So building versus buying. So you mentioned that you prefer building solutions when it when it makes sense. So how do you decide when to build something custom versus purchasing an off-the-shelf solution when it comes to software? I you know, I've had some experience where there's uh other IT directors or IT managers, whatnot, and uh, you know, they start building systems, whether it be for the shop floor functionality and or for security, and it's an in-house built-in system. Um, and they make it so complicated that sometimes you cannot, you know, uh they're they're irreplaceable because no one knows the intricacies of the of the coding. So when do you decide as a director of IT that this organization needs a custom made, custom built software system versus employing a second third party software? Right.

SPEAKER_01 24:26

So usually the the the two pillars that drive that is what's the budget? So I've I've been at places with you know six-figure budget.

SPEAKER_00 24:36

Is that is that like fundamental? It's like okay, I can I can just see Stacy just going into the CFO's office saying, I know you you need all the security, you need all this and stuff like that. Fundamental question what's the budget? What's the budget?

SPEAKER_01 24:49

Because I mean, really, the sky is the limit for what you can employ. Sure. So we're looking at uh manufacturing and monitoring. You know, we've I've done a handful of projects with this, I've inherited projects like this. So you can purchase some managing software that can be thirty thousand dollars a year after a couple, you know, a couple ten thousand here or there to get it built. And it'll do a pretty decent job, but not quite everything you want. Or you can build something that might cost you ten thousand dollars once and you upgrade it as it needs internally. Sure. So I think a lot of times it comes down to what is the what is the end goal? What does this need to do? How critical is it, and who's gonna keep maintaining it? Because like you said, sometimes person becomes irreplaceable. And I know we'll talk about this later, but that's where documentation becomes king. If nobody else knows it but you, it's as worthless as it can be. It needs to be replaced with something other people can know because at the top they will pay because let's say you've got a a system that monitors a manufacturing process that's making ten thousand dollars an hour. Well, if it is gonna make that much money, if you buy something and put it on that, it'll pay for itself in a day and a half. Absolutely. So you're done. But if it's something a little more critical, something more fine-tuned, you know, you build it. Sure. And I've had solutions that have been built that I have finished building, and you know, sometimes they just work better because a lot of times in manufacturing, I think you've seen this, not every single niche has been covered. I need something to do just this task.

SPEAKER_00 26:24

Correct.

SPEAKER_01 26:24

You know, I've got a custom system in my last place that collects 11 million data points a month. Wow, amazing. And it's done with Raspberry Pis and microcontrollers, SQL servers, and Python programs.

SPEAKER_00 26:36

People are using are still using IQMS software.

SPEAKER_01 26:39

Absolutely. It's uh it's still growing. They got bought by 3DS.

SPEAKER_00 26:42

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 26:42

Um, I can personally attest, I don't want to get anybody in trouble. Um, their support's different. Okay. You know, not not quite as as responsive as it was, but they're a much larger company now. They're they're involved or I'll say wrapped up into 3DS's uh eco uh ecosystem. Sure. But it's still big, it's still growing, and it's still getting better.

SPEAKER_00 27:01

Sure. I know one of the the passions that uh the IT department always has, and uh the the feedback that I get is that they will say, uh Daniel, the software is so underutilized. There's so many tools. You can do this, you can do that. What and we're still stuck in the Excel world and the and the other stuff in spreadsheets, and we want to code everything in Excel and and update and stuff like that, which is which is okay, right? We're talking about budget. But then again, you know, there's the the potentiality of growing the system and convincing uh, I guess, uh uh management or corporate that these tools are available for education. Uh sometimes I I feel that the there's um maybe uh they don't fully understand the capacity or the capability uh of what uh this the systems of the softwares can can do for the organization and um working smarter and not harder, right?

SPEAKER_01 27:54

Right. So by the last 20 years of my career, my my my boss has always been someone either C-suite, senior management, VP. I have to speak numbers, and the numbers they want to hear are dollars and cents. Sure. So if we have a product that is underutilized, can we utilize it to improve productivity, to increase productivity, to increase profit? Can we eliminate waste? Can we better give visibility to reports that our customers need that we need internally? Those are the things they need to know because if they push a button and try to see a report and nothing works, they need something else.

SPEAKER_00 28:30

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 28:31

If you remember uh the company that we worked together, one of my primary roles was to fully implement the IQMS software. Sure. We were using about eight percent. Wow, I didn't know that. It was it was very small. So within I think six years, we had it over 80%. And I have uh have friends of mine that had worked there with us co-workers that had moved on to other companies, like, yeah, so-and-so's got IQ as as well. They're not using it anywhere as much as we did. Oh, I'm saying.

SPEAKER_00 28:58

Well, I'm I'm glad you I'm glad you expanded that. It's that definitely uh a professional trying for you. I remember all the uh the PPAP documentation uploading the control plans, PFMEA's, and all the checks and balances for electronic signatures that I have to do. I love the the the quality stop. Nothing moved to the next phase or the next uh stage gate without these approvals being done in the full process. You know, and if not, we will I will get a call from another program manager saying, hey Daniel, you know, make sure you sign off because I'm waiting. Check the box. Well, check check check at least check the box that we know who you mentioned that you're comfortable writing Python. Uh for those that don't know, what it what is Python? That's a snake. Okay. So if that was an IT joke, maybe a dad joke. No, no, so uh comfortable writing pythons, crimping network cables and and serving as an IT director. How how has uh staying hands-on technically influenced your effectiveness as a leader?

SPEAKER_01 29:59

Well, for me, I have trained my boss in several jobs. Sure. So being someone that knows the in and out, that knows the process and can also manage the people that you hire to know the process helps you speak intelligently and really be part of the troubleshooting team. Sure. So, one, as a leader, you have the respect of the people that come in. Sure. You know, I have had managers that only know how to lead people and don't know the process. Now, not to overstep them, I don't want to micromanage. I need to macromanage. I need them to grow and evolve for to be successful in this job and their next job. Always look to your next year, what's your overarching goal here? So being hands-on has one kept me fresh because I truly enjoy the hands-on side of it. But it also has helped me better instruct and teach and develop the team that I'm responsible for.

SPEAKER_00 30:50

So there's a lot of train the schedule training throughout the year on software updates, maybe tools, uh, and uh or improv. It happens on the fly. Yes. You know, uh, one of the things that I I worked for a company, they were very good at uh new employee introduction. So they just did not throw us to the wolves. It was not on-the-job training. There was actually a program in place, and you would spend, I think, two days with IT. And not and not just here's your email, here's your phone. Right. It was not, it was not that type of thing. It was more so how to use the software, uh, the the security features, uh uh tickets, how to put a request of tickets, a troubleshoot, whatnot. We also, as a as a tier one, uh, we had access to all the OEM's uh software. So there was a lot of uh passwords and and privacy uh uh sign-offs, NDAs that we had had to sign off. So imagine two days with IT. For me was it was quite the experience because uh I knew that the organization as a whole, both corporate and the the local uh plant, uh took uh IT uh very seriously, more more seriously than uh I had experience in other.

SPEAKER_01 31:57

Automotive up notice does that.

SPEAKER_00 32:12

And not only a software, different platforms, AutoCAD, maintenance software, um gauging software, and whatnot, and you know, just the do's and don'ts. But the fact that you there were two days of it, you know, uh in in classroom training, this is what we use, this is how we use it throughout the year. We train on ABC DFG. These are your trains, right? Checks and balances, we expect for you to be at this proficiency level at you know the third quarter of your uh of your employment and and the pressure, right? That's okay, I gotta get these systems right because if the the more proficient I became in the systems that were in place, then the less I had to occupy IT right and take them out of their day, you know, their their normal job to help assist uh the functional manager.

SPEAKER_01 32:56

And a lot of times you have a full-time person whose job is that orientation step. So when I started working, it was an automotive company back in the um mid-2000s, they were sorry, early 2000s. Wow, they were very strong on system and structure. So everything was not just standard operating procedure, it was the culture, like it was built in. So we spent a day in orientation with just here's where the exits are, this is where you walk and not walk, this is a manufacturing facility, stay in this area. Day two was IT, and here's your badge, and here's how this works, and here's how the here's how you log into the system. We were using Lotus Domino back then, so Lotus Notes was the email system. So, how does that work compared to Outlook? So it brought everybody up to speed. So within your first week, there was a follow-up too. We had a person that would follow up with you after a week. How are you doing? How are you what everyone was on the same level within their first 30 days?

SPEAKER_00 33:50

Outstanding. That's that's an amazing uh ecosystem. Yes. So you know, IT also has the the the opportunity to update the uh the employee list. So in trouble times reporting. In troubled times, if your name was not on the employee list, you you might want to check with HR. All right, that's the sidetrack.

SPEAKER_01 34:10

He would go through and he would try to type in his password, it wouldn't work, so he didn't mean to get up and check his bad his badge. Yeah, it's like okay, I'm still in. I'm still in call IT outstanding.

SPEAKER_00 34:19

So the art of troubleshooting, you describe troubleshooting as a methodology rather than just a skill. So what does your process look like when you you're faced with a complex problem that no one else can solve? This is, you know, everybody's scratching their heads, banging their heads against the wall, and you're the go-to guy, you're the guru of the organization. How do you face those difficult challenges as a leader?

SPEAKER_01 34:44

So this the 10,000-foot view is way outside of IT. This applies to everything. And IT has just gotten more complicated, but you can still apply the same principle. Okay, everything is a system. Understand how the system works. So the more understanding, more hands-on you have of a system, you know what can go wrong, and you can start checking out your method. You start figuring out what is this okay? Yes, check. Is this okay? Yes, check. You go through all your checkboxes, really. Sure. So the troubleshooting methodology is one experience. So you know right off the bat, if it's in my top hundred things on the top of my head, I know there could be a problem. There's no troubleshooting, there's resolution. You push a button, you make it work. Sure. But when it is head scratching, then it's one of those walk the system. How does the system work? Okay, this level is okay, dig deeper. How's that level? Okay, those are okay. Everything in life, whether you're working on a car, you're building a country, or you're simply managing IT, it's a system. Figure out your system, know what layer you're in, and what your troubleshooting steps are here.

SPEAKER_00 35:48

Check them all, keep going down. Well, you know, when when the production lines, uh value streams rely on on the IT infrastructure to work, you know, I'm checking a gauge, it has to work at a certain certain torque, and and my my monitor goes out, and there's no connection to to record this data point or data might into the server, and the and online goes out uh above goes uh on above me, right? And somebody's calling it at the urgency because the the inability or the the the challenge of getting things resolved in a in in a reasonable manner it equates to finances. Right. You know, this line is down, I haven't produced X amount of vehicles, X amount of parts, or whatever they may be. Uh you know, what what happened? Well, we called IT and IT took two and a half hours to try to get it right. Oh, excuse me, I have to reboot the system. You know, we're gonna go down for about you know, 10 minutes or so, and then everything seems to reset and we're back, we're back online. How do you handle that pressure? Have you first of all have you been there?

SPEAKER_01 36:56

And how and how do you handle that pressure? I had a ringtone for certain people, so I knew how to respond when my phone rang. Oh my god, you had to I've been on call since 2001. Okay. Uh my wife was always called a digital leash. She goes, Hey, your leash is going off, you know. Yes. So being prepared to answer stuff. So one thing, and this this is this is um a philosophy that I've tried to stick with because I do not like repeating myself. I don't like fixing the same problem twice. If I get a call in the middle of the night, that became a project. How do I keep this from doing this again?

SPEAKER_00 37:30

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 37:30

So I need a way to automate this this solution. I need a way to empower the end user. So you remember because you mentioned value street maps. We've done a handful of these. You'd fill up an eight-foot wall full of sticky notes and figure out where you can eliminate waste. We've done that through IT and we did it at the same company. So if you've got a person trying to torque something and the spec they're reading disappears from the screen, they have to have a backup plan. What is their SOP? What is their manual plan? So we have to work on, we know this is a potential failure point. Sure. What can be the backup plan? So for us, every problem never needs to be repeated. It needs to be a project to resolve.

SPEAKER_00 38:08

Absolutely. Wow, that's that's amazing. I remember one time you just brought to remembrance something that that's hilarious. Um, uh, again, it was I was we had we wore many hats, and you know, I'm not I'm not gonna say that was part of the IT team, but I was on the lookout. It was everybody's on the IT team. Yeah, IT team. So something happened on a Saturday, and the operator was unable to enter information, especially the the data, into the computer. And he kept scratching the head, so they they called me, right? And of course, if you call an employee on a Saturday, it was a four-hour minimum OT, right? It was not just because they didn't know where they lived, right? Whatnot, to get there and so forth. When I got there, uh I I asked the person, please show me what's what's going on. It's uh I'm trying to enter this number in the numeric keypad, and nothing's going in. Now you remember, you have numeric keypads in the front of the keyboard, and then you had some on the side. And I'm doing this on the side, and nothing's happening. Nothing's they they didn't even think of using the top ones, but said, you know, so I I I look at it, I I I I hit the number lock, you know, the number lock. And and then he went, whoop, magic. You know, those are the type of things that I'm like, that was the easiest four hours overtime.

SPEAKER_01 39:22

But one of the greatest features features, greatest feature Microsoft ever added to an operating system started in Windows 7. When you're on the logon screen, and if the caps lock is on, yes, it says caps lock on and there's underneath the login. That wasn't a thing until Windows 7.

SPEAKER_00 39:40

Maybe that's why. Maybe maybe maybe those employees that I had to press the little number lock. You know, and it was the easiest four-hour overtime in my life.

SPEAKER_01 39:49

But you think about it. I mean, and that's and it's not a discredit to people. Sure, sure. They're normal humans, they are told to do a job, and I've I've noticed a generation gap. I mean, I have had people that didn't grow up with computers that I'm that are still working with me in their 60s and 70s. They don't understand more than outside of what they're supposed to do. And they're geniuses in their field, yes, but this is something different. Absolutely. So my instructions say to push these numbers, I'm not touching anything else. I'm following these instructions. This command. And if this doesn't work, I'm done.

unknown 40:20

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 40:21

What um you you've migrated entire organizations to cloud very successfully. Uh, and and that's one thing that uh uh it's transformational in the industry now for for not only security reasons, but also data storage and and so forth. Uh, what misconception companies often have about cloud transformation and what should leaders focus on instead? I mean, what what what misconceptions they have about, you know, uh Mr. Tracy, I need, you know, we we have uh storage capacity or security capacity, or we're the company is growing, we're having multiple buildings, right? We need to a cloud transformation. How do you go about the process? What what misconceptions are there?

SPEAKER_01 41:01

So misconceptions uh to me, I believe they've changed over the last decade. So the first migration I did, there was no matter what I turned in as far as project information, it was such a shock when we were done to realize that oh, we have to pay every month for this? Like, yes, this is a subscription service, you know. So one of the one of the biggest things was well, can't we just copy everything up there and turn it on? You know, so trying to speak um trying to translate tech into English has always been a lot of fun. So some of the biggest misconceptions were um people think that it's gonna be incredibly fast. You're now at the mercy of your internet, you know, it will be fast when you're connected. Uh misconceptions will be that it's only gonna cost this certain amount a month. You talk about storage and capacity. One of my biggest reports I ran every single month was storage growth. Most companies, normal manufacturing companies, are gonna grow at 1.5% storage per month. And I would look at my reports and go, okay, my servers currently have this amount of storage. This is the on-premise stuff. Sure. I have this amount of storage left, we're growing at this amount, so within 13 months, we're gonna be hitting red line capacity. I need to start preparing to upgrade the solution or do something else. So translate that to cloud, it's now a subscription. You pay for the CPU usage, so the servers that are running, you pay for storage, and here's the hidden cost people don't think about is the bandwidth. You pay for your ups and downs, your ingress and egress. So I have to do the same thing. We're still growing at 1.5%, even though they're in the cloud. So this is what we're paying this month. But by that month, IT budget's gonna increase by X amount. So the misconception is oh, we're locked in, we'll never pay anything else. No, it goes up every month. So whenever I would turn in my reports, because my boss was always CFO, you know, or VP, I had to make sure they understood that this cost does not go down unless we remove something. This will be an ever-growing cost.

SPEAKER_00 42:58

Correct. Wow, so you said removing something. So if I'm the CFO and I'm seeing that the cost of subscriptions is going high, uh there are there it's a necessity, it's validated. You've presented your business case, uh, you presented your value proposition, we've approved it. But the other side of the cone is I need for you to do uh a lean project uh to analyze data redundancy, blockages, uh hard both software, but also we haven't talked about hardware. You know, how many computers, laptops do we have, how many phones do we have? Right, do we need all these monitors and all these conference rooms? Do we need all these firewalls and whatnot? I need to for you to reduce, okay. It went up 10% on subscription costs. I need at least a 7% cost savings somewhere. Somewhere. Right. Somewhere. What pressures have you had? What projects have you worked that have saved money?

SPEAKER_01 43:52

The easiest one that I can attack with that uh is still in the cloud. So one thing I'll look at is how much information do we need to keep out? Active. So you've got active information you can access anytime. Like you open your computer, open a drive, there it is. Then you have what we call cold storage. Amazon calls it Glacier. I love it.

SPEAKER_00 44:10

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 44:10

It you actually are taking files offline and then you store them outside of your cloud. You pay a much, much smaller amount, like two percent of what you were paying for that. Now that information's not gone, but if you want it, you make a request, it'll show up in two or three days.

SPEAKER_00 44:27

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 44:27

And on the back, and I'll tell you what's geeky because this goes back to my roots. Cold storage means they're removing it from hard drives, copying it to physical tapes, and putting it in a storage. They're offline. It is offline storage. So the first thing is I would have to do that.

SPEAKER_00 44:40

So you have a four Knox of cassette of somewhere. Somewhere. Is it on a on a disc? Oh, it's it's a physical tape. Yeah, it's a physical tape.

SPEAKER_01 44:50

It looks like a think about depends on which ones they use. I think we're up to TR eight or nine, I think, or LTO eight or nine as tape technology is still growing huge. So it's like a VHS tape or two VHS tapes together. Like it's it's it's magnetic tape. It's still tape. So one of the first things I'll do is try to see what we can cold store that takes care of cloud stuff. If I have to reduce on site, because here's something we haven't talked about, there's um a technology called an edge computer. It's just a fancy way of saying, hey, I love computers on site when everything else is in the cloud. So it's performing calculations or functions here instead of trying to copy it and do calculations up there. So you're saving bandwidth. So how many of those systems do we still need? What can we adapt? What can we change? Well, we know that every three to five years we have to swap out laptops, we have to swap out desktops. Who can share systems? If you're on a production floor, four employees are using this one workstation, or how can we do that? So there are there, it's a constant where can we trim fat? IT is always overhead. We are never one to make the company a ton of money. We are to we're cost avoidance more than cost savings. And so that mindset constantly has you knowing what you can do to maintain the uptime of everything else. So they're paying for IT.

SPEAKER_00 46:06

So now with the I would not say threat, but now with the introduction or evolution of artificial intelligence, uh, whether it be Gemini, Cloud, Chat GPT, and so many others now that are dozens now. Um how do how does that migrate into your functionality? Meaning that uh I the as an IT director or an IT department is now creating code to find out where, you know, all these algorithms to where I can find cost savings, and then of course, by the same token, you're writing, please develop the business case to to justify these changes, and uh in addition to that, make a list of all the risk assessments that things that can go wrong.

SPEAKER_01 46:50

So you can show me the gap analysis that I didn't think about, right?

SPEAKER_00 46:53

Yeah, the gap analysis and so forth. You know, it's all about calculating risks, right? Can you in the background create a scenario where this may happen and then and test test this algorithm out before I make this permanent change? And uh, have you in your last years, because this is all all evolving the last step, it's moving fast, and I think it's it's not only is it evolving and is it moving fast, it's also uh ever changing, right? Right. How have you used the um the artificial intelligence to troubleshoot?

SPEAKER_01 47:25

So this this is what I have spent a good probably the last 14 months on. Um I have worked on um AI enablement, like where can we use it? Uh we had a project that hit us where we were trying to you know update media on a website and none of us were qualified media developers, like we didn't know how to do that.

SPEAKER_00 47:44

Trying to use a video training, you know, you have your own images. AI. Right. You're trying to try to get it. AI bot.

SPEAKER_01 47:50

So I mean I I've used AI often unlike most people. You had you ask it general questions and it basically becomes a glorified search engine. Sure. My generation loves the search engine concept. Yes. Because we're lazy. That's our thing. Yeah. So learning how to properly, this could be a whole conversation. Yes, it can be. So I'll try to keep it light. Learning how to work with AI is what's critical. And I've I've spent time uh developing, you know, you know what a prompt is. Like when you type something, that's a prompt. Learning how to create master prompts, how to create system prompts. So a master prompt is this is who I am. This is my role as the person who is talking to you. Here's what I expect in my responses. For me, and if anyone, anyone that works with AI, remove M dashes. Anyone that works with AI, yes. Remove M-dashes from the responses. Because if people copy and paste and it has M dash, you know what M dash is, right? The longer dash. Yes, yes. That's not a key on the American English keyboard. Correct. So people know right away that you didn't write that. Correct. That that's that's right. That's my tech tip for the day. So remove M-dashes. But what I have removed M dashes.

SPEAKER_00 48:58

If you use Cloud, make sure that it doesn't have that, you know. Somebody did that, you know, and uh not to interrupt you, but you know how how Chat GPT or Cloud will give you a say, would you like me to analyze this further? Or they'll ask you a question, they'll give you the response and they copy the whole thing, paste it. That's all newspaper. This is my recommendation. Yeah, but at the bottom, you have that that that default response from this AI. It's like when you didn't write that. It's it's crazy.

SPEAKER_01 49:27

So one of my things with AI is people have to be super careful. I mean, you it can make you dumber because you're not doing your research. Sure. Our generation, we graduated high school without Google.

SPEAKER_00 49:39

Well, I don't know. Yeah, but I'm not gonna date myself, but maybe class of 96.

SPEAKER_01 49:44

Okay, we didn't have Google, we didn't have the internet, we had books. You remember what books are? Yeah, yeah. I spent my time in the library.

SPEAKER_00 49:50

Yeah, index, roller index, yeah, that's me.

SPEAKER_01 49:53

Nowadays, you know, we homeschool, so my kids can use AI gently and I teach them properly. But with most people, AI is making you dumber because it's doing all your work for you. Sure. So what I do with system prompts is I will say, This is who I am, and this is what I expect, no M-dashes. Don't offer to do anything else at the end of what I'm gonna ask you. So I'm not getting those prompts. Okay. And then what I do is I create a system prompt to say, okay, this is who you are. And one of the first things I do is, hey, interview me on this topic and just ask me a ton of questions. Sure. And so if you learn to work, people say, What do you use AI for? I don't use AI, I work with AI. Correct. To me, it's not doing my work for me, it's a coworker. Sure. And one of the biggest rules I have set for it, and this comes in handy when I'm like trying to troubleshoot and build reports, don't agree with me unless you have no other choice. And if you have a better solution, explain to me why. Because my purpose of using this tool, sorry, working with this tool is to learn. I'm always learning, I always want to evolve, I always want to be a better person. If you're doing my work for me, I don't need you. Correct. So knowing how to work with AI to get your reports, to get the proper information, if you just give it general questions, it's going to have to think about the rest. It's going to make up the rest. The more specific you are, the more tightly controlled and more accurate your information's going to be.

SPEAKER_00 51:21

Oh, that's that's amazing because I was talking to somebody that uh we we both agree that, you know, in a at a high, at least in middle school, high school level, uh, our students should be taught project management, uh, should be taught uh financing, business modeling, checks, how to, you know, so so many, so many things. And uh do you see uh obviously uh artificial intelligence curriculum uh should be already now that it's evolving so fast, uh should be uh uh an introductory course at least in in a high school level so people can use it, use uh use it with you know, use AI as a tool, not necessarily as a replacement, because we definitely definitely need a a physical body before the conference room because you're gonna have to explain this this algorithm or this code and whatnot, and you can't have AI doing that for you.

SPEAKER_01 52:10

They they call it AI slop. So again, if you don't give it enough context, I'm gonna give you a great example. Um I cannot remember his name right now, um, Carpathy. He was the uh used to be the head of AI at Tesla. Okay. And he got he used to use this great example. So AI, if it does not have context, cannot make proper decisions. Okay, here's the question. You can type this in, it's quite funny. I need to go to the car wash and wash my car. It's 50 meters away. Should I walk or should I drive? Now it's gonna do the math and say you should walk. Sure. 50 meters.

SPEAKER_00 52:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 52:43

But how can you wash your car if you walk to the car wash? It's a logic engine, it does not have enough context. So that's that's where you're dealing with the topic. So the expertise on the context is gonna give you better, better response and algorithms. So that's what they need to be teaching kids is how to properly use this tool. Plus, you know, whenever Skynet takes over, I want to know who the friendly people are.

SPEAKER_00 53:04

Remote access. People, let's say you have employees, now you're the IT director, and you have a company that's in Sweden, you have another company that's in Poland, another company, and uh, you know, we're talking about 24-7 service and so forth. Different time zones, different time zones and whatnot. Uh, a lot of times I've I've seen people use any desk uh to log in and to troubleshoot, uh, to take over your computer, uh, move your magically move your mouse around and make the repairs and so forth. Um the the the challenges of what you said, different time zones. Uh we were talking about different languages, right? Now the person speaks uh Swedish or Polish uh Spanish or whatnot. And going through those those different challenges, have you had ever uh have you had to work with international uh sister plants?

SPEAKER_01 53:53

So we have uh the last place I worked at, we had a location in Poland. In Poland? In Poland. Uh fortunately, he was very um the the team that was over there, um, he was very bilingual and very self-sufficient. Right. But when I did have to work on stuff, his computer is not in English. Fortunately, I could I would look at screenshots of like I know what I know what I needed to fix, I just know what the words were. So I'd pull up screenshots of my menus, or if I had the computer in front of me, my computer, I could look at like my menus and know what number to click on on it. Correct. So see, but uh again with AI tools nowadays you can actually have it translate stuff for you. You can have it, you know, speak through that kind of thing. But yeah, I mean having to do remote work internationally at various hours, like I'd send an email and get a response at 2 a.m. Oh, that's right. That kind of thing.

SPEAKER_00 54:38

And you have to be available because you know people are expecting those systems to be up. So here's uh what we you wanted to to end up here. Uh documentation and knowledge transfer. We were talking about people writing complex systems, so complex that they are irreplaceable. So you emphasize in documenting documenting everything so the next person isn't starting from scratch. So why is it why is documentation often neglected? And how can organizations build a culture that values documentation?

SPEAKER_01 55:12

So the first question why is documentation often neglected? Because it's on the wrong line item. So you know what tribal knowledge is. Yes, I do. We we live in a manufacturing world of tribal knowledge. This is just the way we've always done it, it's just the way we're gonna keep doing it. When documentation is not high on the priority list, it's not on the priority list. That's the way it works. A lot of times, like, okay, we fixed the problem, that fire's been put out, let's go after the next fire. No one thinks about documentation. So a lot of times I've had to go back and even myself go back and look at any scratch note I took when I was working on it. What did I write down? What did I have to go look up? What was not in front of me? Go dig through emails, what was the conversation, what was the troubleshooting methodology? Sure. So documentation has to exist because, like you said, when you're onboarding someone, if I were working in my company and the next day I was not, the next person needs to come sit at my chair and have something to open and within a short amount of time know everything, at least infrastructure. Absolutely. Where where what is this? Where is it located? How does that work? Where's the key for that? What's the password list for this? Where do I get this information? Someone needs to know where the stuff is located. Without it, your product is worthless. I've worked at companies that a person literally passed away. A guy had been there from his teens all the way to the end of his life. He was the guru. Yes. When he passed away, nothing was written down. He was the book. And at that point, his product was deemed obsolete because nobody knew it.

SPEAKER_00 56:52

And it was just simply replaced. Wow, that's amazing. You know one of the things when when the companies are audited, whether it be ISO 9001, uh ISO 14001, or IT 69, I 6949, a lot of times as a 21-year quality students manager, uh, you know, may uh depending if you're making software, the company's making software, absolutely. Everything's uh directed into auditing the the IT department, the software department, the methodologies to validate, verify the algorithms, uh cloud computing, setting up the profiles of employees, and so so many so many other things, especially when you're uh working perhaps in a military base, right? When security or or you're a a supplier to building tanks or aerospace and uh FDA, NASA, et cetera, Boeing, you know, those those type of systems, um, you know, there's there's there's that auditing portion with regular production and manufacturing may not be so heavy in the auditing, right? Uh what we're asked, maybe just in in in a historical sense, is how many threats has the company experienced and how many threats has the company been able to manage, detect, first of all, detect and prevent, right? We're talking about Trojan horses and and and spam emails, you know, how many threats has the company had and so forth? Uh, why do you think that perhaps they're not audited as much in the uh manufacturing production? You know, how what's you know, from your experience, from I'm an auditor. How many times has an auditor come to and say, you know what, uh, show me the intricacies because it's complicated, because it's hard to explain. Um, what would you say?

SPEAKER_01 58:36

It should never be too hard to explain because then you've got you know the question of what's under the covers. Okay. So uh the the place that you and I work together every single year, I had to complete an audit for our um for our legal team. I don't know what all they did with it. Yes. IETF required a lot of things. Now we did not manufacture um microchips or any software that went into an end-user product. So I'd have to worry about that part of the audit. Correct. But we had to know, or I had to give information on how our backups work, what are our disaster recovery plans? Do we have a critical infrastructure preparedness plan? Like what happens if the building is gone and we start from scratch? What do we do? That's you know, so I had to have these plans in place. And the place we worked together, I started in 06 by my one-year anniversary in 07. I had a basic disaster recovery plan. Because I have, in my in my experience, just even at that point in my career, that's critical because I don't want to walk in here tomorrow to an empty lot that used to be my building.

SPEAKER_00 59:38

Yeah, you know. You know, in my in my PPAPs, there's not a uh what's called a DFMEA, a design failed effect effects analysis. So from a DFMEA uh on IT, can it can I just want to be honest to the audience? I I rarely have seen a DFMEA from an IT perspective. Is that something that you guys do in secrecy in the background? We have a conference room, you know, saying, okay, we can't tell the employees all all the risks that are there there's there is a certain mythology and and legend around IT.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:09

We have to keep a reputation. Um we're watching everything that's when it comes to audits though, usually things are we it's audited internal and we have to be prepared to provide information, but a lot of the audit information, a lot of our you know, our structure has to be kept within a tight circle. So there was a notebook that I always created for for my boss that was basically the IT Bible. Everything was in there, including, of course, I'm not there anymore, so I'm gonna go ahead and share it, a sealed envelope of passwords. So this was broken up by it was 13 chapters of everything that made up IT. Sure. And it evolved and it changed. And we went to cloud, it gained another hundred pages. Like it was just there's so much stuff.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:54

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:54

So it is complicated. But as far as audits, I mean, there's a lot of standards out there. I mean, you've got um, I'm gonna mess some of these up. So there's uh SOC two, there's a lot of these that you have to really if if a company isn't holding you to it, if you don't have a customer that's holding you to it, most companies won't hold to it. But if a company holds to it, you have to follow it. Absolutely in automotive, there was uh Sarbanes Oxley. And that was uh we always joked about it. If you want to throw away a pen, it takes two signatures. Like they were very strict. But you know, the places we've worked, we've seen them move from ISO to TF to IETF to you know, just watching the evolution.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:29

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:30

And IETF for IT had three pages 30, 40 questions. Sure. You know, plus our uh insurance at the company, the lawyers needed me to do a a thing. But I mean we keep it internal, but there's not a lot that's done on IT separate unless it's already written in stone that it has to be done.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:50

Sure, because you know, uh as a again, as a I frame I frame to have done the framework for layer process audits. So before I do the quality management system audit. So if I'm doing layer process audits and and or any gamble walk where I have to go to the source of of the workspace or workstation, uh it's it's difficult to develop sometimes a layer process audit for for for IT from my experience. Um when you have how how big of a group have you managed uh as far as your IT personnel department? The biggest group and the smallest group? Smallest group is the Army of One.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:26

And I'll tell you what, I mean, I wrote that guy up all the time. Yeah, you wrote you wrote the Army of One.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:31

He'd sit around and watch YouTube videos.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:33

He had a lot of PTO though. Really long coffee breaks. You know, you'd go to the bathroom wait too long. Um the largest team I have run uh was I think 25 people. 25 people. Uh what and and to me, really, that was it was two teams. So I mean, I had a lead on each side. It was a little heavy to keep up with. 25 people, how big was that company? That's a big group. 5,000. 5,000. I think. I mean, in that building, probably well, that structure probably 500 in that location. But what I have found to be, and it depends on what you do, and of course, another paradigm shift, this has changed. When I got in IT, we had like five jobs in IT, and now there's over 400. So what I have found is keeping a tight team of five to ten people, of highly trained, highly specialized individuals that can do their job without much question. And I mean, that's junior to mid-level, mid-level to senior. You need people of all strengths. That is what I have found to be the most effective. If you're doing programming, you've got a scrum system, an agile system in place, that's your power team. If you've got network engineers, I'm not calling down a contact list. I know who to call, I know who else to call. It's not a waterfall system.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:45

It's you know, you have to be have some sort of diversity. Right. I I want to hit some some pointers here before before we before we end. Uh for this next generation, you know, with this the complexity of software languages, uh, the complexity of uh now AI, uh cloud computing, quantum computing, and and all these other things. Maybe it's it's a it's a different time of place with all the data centers that are popping up uh in in our local neighborhood, creating creating some opportunities, right, for for many neighborhoods, right? And we see it throughout the news, uh, but it's really unavoidable. It's it's gonna happen yes or yes, right, as we move more into the technology, the robotics and quantum fixes, physics, quantum computing. Uh, if if a young IT professional came to you today and asked how to build a long, successful career in technology, in IT, as a director of IT or software engineer, what advice will you give them that they would probably wouldn't hear from their college environment or from their uh close circle environment? What what from from a 30-year uh senior pillar in the community creating all these frameworks and and and transitioning organizations to work more effectively, what is it that a young individual has not heard? And a rec more so like a reality check. How do how do I become a successful IT individual?

SPEAKER_01 1:05:13

So again, 10,000-foot view. If you don't love what you do, you'll hate it when it gets hard. So when I started college in 98, I want to quote that.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:23

When you don't love what you do, it will you'll hate it when it gets hard. You'll hate it when it gets hard. Write that down, please.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:31

And I the the experience I can share with that is when I started college in '98, the inrush of IT people was huge. The the classes were maxed out, twenty seven students, you know, in these classrooms. By the second year, half were gone. A lot of people jump on it because like, oh, it's big money, we're gonna go be IT. I've been at IT thirty years, I'm still waiting on the big money. Sure. But uh what what people do is they'll follow training.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:56

My producer just like I I I heard like a wind over here. My producer laugh. I'm not sure why, but we'll talk about that.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:03

So what so so the biggest thing is you know in any job you have, when it gets hard, it's your passion that keeps fueling you. Because troubleshooting, I'm out of ideas. I don't know where else to go. What else am I gonna dig into? You have to love what you do or you'll hate it. If you I have seen people that graduate with thirty thousand dollars in student debt, the beautiful piece of paper, get a junior position somewhere, and after a year or two, this isn't what I want to do.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:31

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:32

And now you're starting over with student debt. What's your plan? Now that's great advice, but I mean, really good advice. And I tell my kids this all the time. I said, do what you love and find somebody to pay you to do it. If you can't find that person, it's time to start a business.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:49

Well, yeah, contractor work, uh create the job, create create the job, uh programming. You have to be also diverse. You know, uh you can be full-time, but you can also be a consultant. Right. Uh you can also be a mentor, subject matter expert, subject matter expert, and so forth, project manager, uh, part of the project management team and so forth. That's one of the things that that you know, uh, you know, try to be a little bit more diverse in the IT.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:14

So I think the last reality check here would be when you go to bed at night, are you excited to get up and go to work the next day or are you dreading it? All the flags are there. You will know I can't wait to go and fix something, or it's 6 a.m. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:29

What does 10 years from now look like in the IT world? Now just if I'm in the IT world or in general? Just in general, just in general, you know, we're looking at the artificial intelligence, cloud computing, quantum computing, uh a lot of the jobs, you know, have more being more and more somewhat replaced for automation and AI and AI role uh AI bots, sensors, switches, bridges, you know, the the the whole the whole uh technology. Uh where do you see the the IT uh world uh quantum quantum and AI? Thank you. Quantum AI.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:03

That's that's easy enough to do. I mean, quantum computers now are already smashing 900-year-old encryption in less than a week. Um so that there's there's actually a certification that encryption systems have to have. I think it's called Quantum Ready. So it's like uh QOC, I think I think the acronym stands for. So I would love to be proven wrong. So we'll find out in 10 years how this works. Um, I have seen IT go from a turtle's pace to a rabbit's pace to light speed.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:30

Yes. And in a in in five years, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:08:33

And it's it's so common that uh IT technology tells that CPU speed will double every 18 months. By the time that was stuck that quote was made, it was increasing every six months. We've almost hit critical mass on what we can do with CPU, so we're just stretching them out. So I think we're done on that one until IBM finishes the organic processors. Go Google that, that'll keep you excited. Sure. So I I think what we're looking at is we right now we are stuck at the ceiling of hardware. Hardware really can't get much bigger, it can only get wider. So there will have to be another paradigm shift. One of the big ones was solid state computers. Correct. That took a computer scientist and a theoretical physicist. I'm not kidding. Because instead of magnetic media that we're writing stuff to, we're storing data in electron stacks. Go look it up, it's crazy. Yeah. When I saw that, I'm like, okay, we're on to something. Yes. I'm waiting for the next thing there. Oh, that's right. Now, as far as AI, I think, I mean, there's a huge boom. And just like the the dot-com bubble, it's gonna pop. We're going to normalize. And I think a lot of the money, a lot of the data centers that we have going out there, they're either going to make it huge or they're gonna be dark within 20 years because we're going to normalize and realize what we need, or there'll be some phenomenal chip technology that hardware ceiling is gonna get blown out and it's gonna get much simpler. So I think AI is gonna be more of a partner than a than a uh a search engine.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:04

Wow. I think we're live, we're living for those you know, dating myself, the Star Trek days, right? The Star Trek, you know, I was telling somebody one when somebody calls me and I look at a hologram in my in my phone, I've got the meta glasses, instant information. I think uh Elon Musk said we're all gonna become cyborgs in somehow, some way.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:24

Absolutely. Well, I tell my kids I my generation, we went from nothing in our hand, we had calculator watches. Yeah, I remember that cast you to palm pilots, and I remember the first time I zoomed on a touchscreen tablet. I'm like, this is gonna be big. And that's so natural. My kids are born with it.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:41

Uh uh, you know, when I when I first got that Blackberry phone with a little typewriter, I mean, I was I was uh, you know, I'm telling you the best one we ever had. Yeah, that was the best one we ever had. Uh you know, wow, Stacey Sharp, director of IT Information Systems, Information Engineer, 30 years of IT experiences, seeing many of the paradigm shifts that he has mentioned, among many other things. We can spend weeks about all the projects that he has accomplished, the transitions that he has done for many organizations. What a wealth of knowledge uh to all those uh people that uh are are definitely interested in this amazing quantum physics, quantum computing, so many other things that he's keeping himself abreast because you have to. It's part of it, it's your job, and of course, don't forget the documentation. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. This has been Daniel Badijo. Check us out on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the YouTube channel, Mr. Stacy Sharp has given us uh a whirlwind of information for us to dissect, and we're gonna be talking about this for weeks to come. I will see you on that next episode.