Podcast #6: The CIO perspective with Dave Czeszewski - Part 2

Sure. Vendors are as important as your staff, I think, you know, not in an HR kind of way, you know, or benefits or things like that, of course, but the way you treat your vendors will come back in a lot of ways, right? So I always use the example: I said, you know, when there's a big problem and you know what hits the fan, are those vendors picking up the phone at 2:00 a.m., right? So the common response to that is, well, we have a support contract and a toll-free number, and we'll call in and create a ticket, and they're contractually obligated to support us, yeah. Well, we all know that at 2:00 in the morning, your call goes someplace overseas, those people don't know you from Adam, but your account executive does, and their managers do, and all the people that I meet in the business do, and they want to retain your business, and they also want to not look bad in the industry. So to get them to help you, you have to treat them fairly and with respect. And you know, a lot of times procurement organizations are there because sometimes IT people get too close with your vendors. They're there to protect the company, I get that, but also the vendors need to know that you're gonna negotiate, you're gonna try to get the best price, you're gonna look at the best value, you're gonna look at the best solution, but once I know that it's a fair playing field and you're not going to throw them curveballs, and you're going to participate in reference calls, you're going to participate with other things in the industry with them, I think when you need that help, they're there. And I've seen that with you guys, I've seen that with other vendors, and I've helped a lot of vendors along the way, even startups, even a long time ago, and they all remember that. It's just human nature, and you can't treat a vendor like crap.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there's a couple things. There's a couple dimensions here. One is the business world has changed, right? So a lot of the strategy for companies was geographic dispersion, so people would have offices on East Coast, West Coast, north-south, right? Well, that's gonna be spread throughout the entire country now, at home. So our productivity is good. Some groups are better at work from home than work from work, so why not keep that going? And then some groups naturally are better at work from work, so let's bring that back. So I think it's yet to figure out where certain groups need the work. And then I think standardize on your equipment, your cloud, all your security around that, and then be ready to go a hundred percent again because it could come again, right? Right. And then I think the other thing is, do you use technologies or services like Amazon long term? Because long term it could become expensive, as opposed to buying, it's the capex versus opex debate, right? So it all depends on your company too. So we had to go through that, but you have to tighten down everything. So right now we're on a VPN. Should that be a permanent circuit? I think Amazon calls it Direct Connect, I think Azure calls it ExpressRoute. You have to get those things in place. I think for us, we should do both because we're going to use both clouds for different use cases or different situations. I think you have to really look at your firewall capability, your VPN capability, how do you extend licenses and burst licenses and all those things. I think you really have to think about it as, I have, you know, if you spread out right now, I have forty-five hundred offices instead of just having nine, right? Right. All these people dispersed. The other thing is the exfiltration of information. A lot of people probably, you know, I don't know this for a fact, I could assume across all industries, a lot of people took home paper files, things like that. You might have potential customer information out there, contracts or things that are out, the barn door is open, the horses are gone, and now I gotta go find out what's going on. So yeah, I think it's an excellent thing. We always talked about this as our business continuity plan. You used to say at one time we can reserve five floors in some buildings someplace if we needed it, right? Yeah, yeah, well that thinking is like diets gone all right, yeah, that's old. You can't do that anymore. So work from home is the way to go. We just have to come up with the most cost-effective, standard way, the most secure way to do it. And what I tell my executives is, we did it, it's not perfect, and we're gonna try to make it better, but it takes a while. But yeah, I tell you what, a plug for Amazon: if we didn't have Amazon, I don't know what we would have done.

Oh, and that's another story. Before we even got into this with Amazon, we had about a thousand students using Amazon WorkSpaces. We had to get approval to use Amazon WorkSpaces. We asked for three thousand, and they approved us for eighteen hundred, and we were waiting for that, and there was almost a debate: are we even gonna get it? Because it was the toilet paper run. Amazon was run, and you couldn't even get to your Amazon architect. So just to be clear, you had to get approval from Amazon. They need to know, you have to justify your usage and what you're doing with it. Wow. And that was just because of COVID, not prior to that though. So let's go and procure a large segment of WorkSpaces. They have to do their architecture, so they have to understand what you're doing with it. Gotcha. And do they need to procure additional equipment, and what data center should it go into? So I learned a lot about Amazon. Certain Amazon data centers can do Windows 10 in the native fashion, and some can. Interesting. Like it runs on Windows Server 2016 with a Windows 10 face. Well, that changes your applications because some applications don't run on Windows Server. You know, so we didn't know that, so we learned it. But we got approval for our 3,000. Wow. That's another thing: we were using Amazon WorkSpaces for quite a long time with our students, and that helped us get to 3,000 approved. But once we got that approved, I felt a lot better. Oh yeah, I did. I think I started crying.

Well, from that, 95% of our business is in an online environment anyway, so you guys were really prepared for this in the first place from a student and faculty perspective. Yes. From a staff perspective, one could say no, but then you look at it, we got it done in four days. You probably could say well, it wasn't that hard, right? But yeah, I think it's kind of what I just said: you have to have work from home as part of your delivery, because we're looking at it as an opportunity because now we can recruit from 50 states rather than four states. Yeah, that's what I can draw from admissions advisors from across the country. Financial aid advisors, but now I can do shifts differently. This is huge. So we have part of our business, we respond to a student or a prospect that shows interest. We have a team that responds when there's interest to qualify to make sure that the student is really interested, and then we get that student to the appropriate advisor to help them in their admissions process. Well, a lot of times was an eight-hour shift, right? And depending on they started at 7:00 in the morning, which is a big time, but at night when it's really busy, they couldn't work. You were from 7:00 to 11:00, and then from, you know, your kids come home from school, you can feed them dinner, and then you can get on from 7:00 tonight, you know, easily. So that's a really exciting potential. So work from home is now a tool. It's always been a tool for knowledge workers, right? Because they always had a laptop, VPN, they traveled a lot, that was kind of like that. Now for your frontline employees that are doing the work, now they can work from home or work for days from home or three days from home. So I think for those that are in commercial real estate, I don't know what the future looks like, but again, some teams work better together, just the way it is. The other thing is, I think technology has a huge implication on the medical community and on the public healthcare system. AI, all the data mining to get a vaccine. I mean, you hear all these stories about how these tool sets are speeding up the identification of potential vaccines. It would be very interesting to see how that... I think they said with the last SARS or MERS, it took them five years to get a vaccine into the public. They said if they could do it now in eight months for COVID, that would be a miracle. But I know just the past week, they have a couple being tested in the wild, you know, in public. So that's an accelerator of technology. Plus, I think technology can really help logistics. I think a company like Amazon, who is very good at logistics, could help FEMA coordinate responses, using technology, robotics, whatever, to get the right equipment, the right PPE, the right medicine, the right ventilator load to the right place at the right time. Logistics is a big deal.

And it's not perfect yet, and I'll be the first to say, but to the credit of my business partners, I couldn't have done it without them. One is the attitude of everybody in the company was excellent. It was not a problem. There was no ego. Everybody was on the same page, and that all comes from the tone at the top from our boss. So nobody, even today, everybody's like, the technology is working great, there's one-off things, but we'll just deal with it. There's no finger-pointing at all. That's awesome. That's the magic of the whole thing. And sometimes when you watch these press conferences on TV, you're wondering, hey, we don't need that. No doubt.

Thank you.

Thank you very much for the invite. It was fun.

Sounds good.