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Billions & Billions of eyeballs, six continents, 10k+ servers, and plenty of lessons learned over 2+ decades in IT. If you're looking for quick tips on optimizing tech, managing suppliers, and growing a business, 20 Minutes Max is the space for you.
Join me as I talk about things that come up during my day and share insights on taking your business to the next level. In less than 20 minutes, you'll walk away with actionable advice and strategies for success. Take advantage of this valuable resource for CEOs, CFOs, and business leader.
Hi. Max Clark. The big secret in IT projects is 9 out of 10 times, the decision's already been made for you. You just don't realize it yet, or you don't realize where to look to figure it out. And what do I mean by that?
Speaker 1:Outside of a start actually, even with a start up, very few things are greenfield. You already have something in place. You have physical locations. You have existing applications. You have systems you have to integrate.
Speaker 1:You have an existing platform that you want to augment or replace. You have processes that your business runs, that your team uses. You have clients. You have vendors. You know?
Speaker 1:I mean, go go down this list. Right? There's a lot of different pieces of this puzzle that are already in place. So the trick becomes and when we are working with our clients and and advising them, the first thing is is understand the why. Like, why are you trying to do or why are you talking about doing what we're talking about?
Speaker 1:Right? Like, is there is the problem? Do you have a pain? Do you have expansion? Do you have an objective?
Speaker 1:Do you have a target? You know, do you have a goal? Like, what's actually driving this conversation? And a lot of times it could be simple. It could be, you know, a cost recovery, cost management, cost controls.
Speaker 1:It could be efficiency. It could be, hey. You know, our team is getting completely crushed with this thing, and how do we take them off this menial task that has to happen all the time and have them actually focus on things that help the business move forward. You know, like, there's lots of different things here that drive these things. And so it's, you know, find your why is number 1.
Speaker 1:But then, you know, as the advisor, second part that we have to really dig into is what's already there. And if you already have firewall infrastructure, firewalls and routers and you're talking about doing SD WAN or you wanna do SSE, or you wanna go all the way to SASE, and you're trying to understand this, well, that investment that you have in your existing firewall platform, especially if you're in contract for support and maintenance, might be a pretty big determining factor for what your available options are. Now there's a lot of firewall vendors in the market that'll tell you that they have full blown SaaS solutions and that they are creatively marketing to you, and they require you to have other things. Maybe their architecture requires you to have a centralized location, and they're gonna spoke and hub your remote sites through a central location to then connect your applications. That works fine if you have a data center or a data center and a redundant data center.
Speaker 1:But if you've moved and you're completely in cloud and you're Sassy sorry, SaaS applications, that kind of application probably doesn't make sense for you. You know, SD WAN has concepts of overlay and overlay. You know, where do you actually insert this thing into your network stack? Well, big part of that is what are you already running? Right?
Speaker 1:Like, what what routers do you have? What firewalls do you have? What architecture do they support? Where do your applications sit? How do your applications talk to each other?
Speaker 1:You know, that becomes kinda like you know, I mean, obviously, there's a very engineering, nerdy kind of conversation that takes place there. We get onto whiteboards, we get that phone with colored pens and, you know, figure out how the stuff moves around. Other examples. Right? You know, applications.
Speaker 1:Applications a lot of times get overlooked. Right? You know, what is your ERP? What is your CRM? Where is your data lake?
Speaker 1:What what information are your employees actually interacting with? How do you make that interaction more efficient for them? You know, you'll hear you'll hear terms like swivel chair. You know, a lot of times maybe they'll get expressed in in contact centers or call centers. You know, and really this is idea that you have an application that that person has to interact with in order to receive and handle a phone call, but then at the same time, they have 1 or more applications that then they need to interact with to help the person who is calling them.
Speaker 1:And how do you compress that activity down so it requires less action by that person? So, again, you know and I hate always kind of expressing this in in terms of, like, you know, large math numbers. But if you have 500 agents in your call center and you can figure out how to, you know, cut a minute off each interaction. Your average interactions are 5 minutes, and, you know, you just kinda scale up that math of how many people you can handle. And and and by the way, that's really good for your customer because it lowers hold times, which people hate.
Speaker 1:Other pro tip. If you have people calling in and you don't have virtual hold turned on, please, for the love of all things holy and wonderful in the world of technology, please enable virtual hold because we love it, and you should absolutely have it. But we go back to this and we say, we spend a lot of time trying to understand how your business is working and what it's currently using. There are platforms in every category of IT services that might not be on the surface, the branded solution that you could think of and say, hey, this is absolute you know, like, you don't see them advertising. You don't see them in terms of market dominance.
Speaker 1:You don't see you know, it doesn't you know, it's not like the the cool thing. Right? But but this is where this gets really fun because I guarantee you there is an IT service provider that is focused on your niche. And and then it's gonna sound crazy, but these things get really specific. We're running Salesforce with Einstein AI, and we want a contact center that then integrates with Microsoft Teams as a primary interface for our agents to use.
Speaker 1:There's a service provider for that that focuses on that. Are there really good service providers out there that integrate with Teams? Of course. Are there really good service providers out there that integrate with Salesforce? Of course.
Speaker 1:But finding that intersection between Salesforce, Einstein, Teams, and the primary interface for a contact center for your customer for your, you know, customer interactions, maybe not so much. And this is where I say, you know, the decision you've already made the decision. You've already picked your contact center. You've already picked your data center infrastructure. You've already picked your cloud platform.
Speaker 1:You've already picked your security infrastructure. You've already picked what SD WAN you're going to run. You know, might not seem like it, but you have. You have already made the decision. You just don't understand that the decision that you made and how far back in time maybe you made it.
Speaker 1:Now, 3rd thing that we get to do as the advisers with our clients is, you know, we talk about past state, we talk about present state, we talk about future state, and we talk about like like strategic state. I just invented that, by the way. But and this is usually driven because our client will have a problem or objective that they need to achieve today. Right? So what was the past and what's the present?
Speaker 1:What do they have to achieve today? And once we start talking about that and figuring that out, we can apply other information. Right? So what do we see? We see a lot of projects.
Speaker 1:We see a lot of industries. We see a lot of clients. We see the arc of companies, and we see the arc of technology deployments. So if you're deploying something today, how do we create that and use that as a building block and a foundational element for something tomorrow? And this is one of the funnest things I get to do is in 12 months when a client calls back and says, hey.
Speaker 1:You know, Max, you know, we've we've done x, y, and z, and now we wanna do this other thing, or we've got this requirement that shifted, or, you know, we have a a a compliance or regulation that's come down, or we have a supply chain. We have a we have a customer requirement that we have to meet, and and we get to tell them, you're ready to go. Like, this is a feature. You just have to sign an addendum and check a box in this platform. This platform is already ready for you to turn on.
Speaker 1:And you and you get that, like, what? What are you talking about? What? Yeah. You're ready.
Speaker 1:You know? We we put this in place for you already. We knew where you were going and, you know, read the tea leaves. Right? But those are fun conversations.
Speaker 1:I love that. And, you know, and and it's great because everything that you're doing should be giving you, you know, I mean, done well. Right? You're getting the tactical. We're solving or we're accomplishing what we need to today and we're solving for the present.
Speaker 1:But it should give you that strategic. You should get a strategic outcome out of this. And even if you don't know that there's a strategic place that you're going to or what what's if you're working with a good team, if you have a good adviser in place, they are going to lay the foundation and give you the the framework to actually execute that. You know, if you're deploying an SD WAN today, what is that that road map for you to take that SD WAN and integrate it with an SSE and get a Sassy solution? Right?
Speaker 1:Lots of acronyms, but that's a good point. You know? But here we go. How do you take and ultimately replace your on premise firewalls with a next generation cloud based cloud based firewall, and then unlock secure web gateways, remote browser inspection, cloud access service broker, data loss prevention, z t n a, zero trust network access. You know, here's look at that.
Speaker 1:You know, here's a foundational piece of technology that was solving a problem for the present. That's an unlocking a road map for your future and your strategic needs. And it's okay if you're not supposed to understand this. You know, you're supposed to understand your business and and focus on your business. And you can just bring in and leverage an adviser, somebody who's seen this a bunch and understands how this stuff plays together and can either, you know, work with your technical team, advise your technical team, give them guidance.
Speaker 1:Don't don't spend your life on Google trying to figure this stuff out. It changes so fast. If you don't have if you're not dedicated and focused on this stuff, it's just, you know, it's it's just overwhelming. I mean, tech and tech marketing is a mess. You know?
Speaker 1:Like, we again, we won't say we won't say line. We'll say creative marketing. That's what we'll use. We use the you know, people will creatively market to you to make you believe things that aren't necessarily true, and you usually only find out the truth after you've signed a contract and have made it some some way down the implementation and deployment process. And then you get the, like, whoops, that doesn't actually do that.
Speaker 1:Oh, no. What do we do? And look, it's it's really hard to, you know, unwind technology decisions in certain cases. I mean, you know, you've got contracts and you've got some sort of terms. You have to wait for that term to run out before you can make that change.
Speaker 1:You're also investing in people and process. So you're training your infrastructure, your deployments, your project plans. What does it actually take to get implemented, how do you support it. And I'm not saying that the will to unwind decisions. It's not you know, this isn't a one way door.
Speaker 1:You can unwind decisions. It's just the level of effort required to unwind decisions is really brutal. And if you have something that's gonna take you 12, 18, 24 months to deploy and you've got 9 to 12 months of selection in front of it, you know, you can be 2 to 3 years down the road before you've discovered an oops, then you're gonna spend another 6 months figuring out how to unwind that whoops. Maybe another 6 to 12 months to, you know, start the process with another supply, another service provider. And then you got another 2 years deployment.
Speaker 1:You know, that's that's 5 years is not unrealistic to talk about of unwinding a decision. And there you get into a really other fun problem, which is in those 5 years, what else has changed? What are your competitors doing? What's happened with the market that you're in? Has it changed and evolved?
Speaker 1:And, you know, instead of being 5 years behind, wouldn't it be nice to be 5 years ahead? So, anyways, back to the original point here. Again, majority of the time, you know, if if you're in a conversation and you're looking at you're evaluating, like, speeds and feeds and trying to figure out what what widget a versus widget b does, you know, you're you're probably not looking at this right. Right? Go back to what's the why.
Speaker 1:What's the organization actually trying to do? What is your company trying to achieve? What is the why? And then it turns into what do you currently have and how do you integrate that tech with what you currently have? Because what you currently have has probably already made that decision for you.
Speaker 1:Don't have Einstein AI? You don't wanna run a contact center platform that depends on Einstein AI. You wanna go to Sassy? Don't deploy an SD WAN platform that's not gonna integrate with an SSC, you know, platform. You know, like, you can see you know, that's that's simple examples, but that's the point.
Speaker 1:I'm Max Clark. I hope this helps. If you have any questions, comment below. Reach out. Send me an email.
Speaker 1:Love to help you. Hope this helps.