Technology Implementation – Digital CxO Podcast EP62

Hello and welcome to the digital CXO podcast. We are on our fourth week of our brand new revamped podcast. I'm Amanda Razani, and I'm here with Mike Baard.

How are you doing today? I'm doing great. Happy to see you as always.

Same. So today we are gonna cover several issues and topics surrounding digital transformation and innovation. And I'm gonna take it over to Mike.

All right. Well, we have a story up on digital CXO talking about, um, you know, technologies related to, say like the Apple Vision Pro thing that just came out. Um, I looked at this and, you know, I'm sure it's a better implementation, but it's not really much different than what we've seen in the past with things like Microsoft HoloLens.

And, uh, we also have a story about a company that is kind of using spatial technologies to let you manipulate things off of your iWatch so you can kind of just manipulate. And, um, and I, I'm certain that there's use cases for this in terms of, I don't know, maybe training or working on airplane engineering diagrams and applications and digital twins and all this other stuff that's out there. But I'm not quite convinced that in my everyday life I'm gonna be walking around with a helmet that makes me look like a, uh, an astronaut of some type and trying to have a discussion with somebody, even though that I can see them, it won't look like I'm looking at them.

And so the whole thing will be salvage, say a little disjointed, but I don't know. Amanda, what do you think? Is all this stuff coming mainstream in our lifestyle soon and, you know, am am am I just having a boomer moment?

Well, I think right now, um, that technology is, is more for the gamers who are really into, into the, the Apple Vision Pro or any of the headsets, and they wanna be able to easily access all their other Apple, uh, you know, their Apple Watch or their iPad and everything without removing the headset and just stay fully immersed. Um, but I would say looking toward the future, I remember a while back, um, when they tried to come out, well, I don't remember if it was Apple, but somebody tried to come out with the smart glasses and they were more just like glasses. Um, and I think that might be the way the future is something that looks more streamlined and normal, but gives you that full immersion.

Um, but I think we're probably a little bit far from that. But like you said, with the training, that is also an excellent use case because I know for a fact like in the healthcare industry and, um, nursing degrees, that they do a lot of training with those headsets and making you feel like you're in the room working on a patient in real life. And I've actually used one of those and gotten to go through the program and it was really awesome.

All right. That's cool. Cool.

I'm a little suspicious of the teenagers with the gaming use case for the following reasons. Um, if I walk into a room and I am talking to my son who is a teenager, and I will not know if he is listening to me, if I cannot see whether or not his eyes are rolling or not. 'cause that's usually my dead giveaway.

So if he's got that tucked in behind a helmet somewhere and I can't actually see whether or not what I'm telling him is registering or not, I'm gonna tell him take that helmet off while you're talking to me. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it, it's, it, it can get a little disturbing because it's very addicting, especially with the younger, with the teenagers and, and the younger kids.

All this immersion is, is becoming hours on end of, uh, gaming and playtime, and how do we get 'em back outside and doing other activities? Well, the Vision Pro thing at least is what, like 2,500 bucks or something like that per three. So I, I'm not quite ready to put that on anybody's Christmas list.

I'm sure that there are some folks out there in the valley or somewhere that will, but, um, I wonder how long will it take for them to get that down to like something that fits on, like my glasses fit, it'll be, you know, something that I can just kind of embed inside of that lens and, um, it won't require, you know, something that is so massive mm-Hmm. And maybe, you know, I'll just be able to see that spreadsheet or Word document as I'm, uh, talking to you versus, you know, having to kind of flip around on my laptop and hope that I hit the right thing at the right time. Right, Yes.

I think that that's the way of the future for sure. Of, of course though, then we're gonna have the same issue we had with the, the earbud things where people are walking around talking and I would get confused and think they were talking to me. So now we won't know what they're, you know, if they're talking to you or to, to the rest your glasses, I guess.

Right. We will have to retrain people in the finer arts of socialization, right? Because there are folks who have earbuds walking in their ears and they're walking down the street screaming at the top of their lungs because they think that, you know, they're talking to somebody 20, 50 miles away, whatever it might be.

And so the end result is all we ever hear is, you know, them screaming at somebody and you know, then maybe two minutes of silence and then more screaming, right? Yeah, exactly. All right.

It's gonna be wild, it's gonna be crazy. It's gonna be different, but it's coming. So the question is, is how do we kind of adjust?

Because eventually at $2,500 headset's probably only gonna cost maybe four or 500 bucks. Might take a few years, but once it gets down to that level, and then maybe it's on somebody's Christmas list, we'll see what happens. Um, you had an interview up on digital CXO, we were talking to some of the execs over at SAP about the future of the enterprise and where AI fits on that.

And I think in a lot of ways SAP is one of those voices that hasn't been heard enough in this whole AI spectrum because so many corporations are using their software on the backend. And some of it also, you use some of their stuff on the front end for that matter. But SAP is huge, its footprint is everywhere.

What did you learn in that conversation? What's your sense of what's going on with those guys in ai? Yes, so it was a good conversation.

Um, it was, it was just about implementation and um, you know, how, how to, uh, do it efficiently and, uh, analyzing the cost factor and, and how to do it, um, in the best way for your return on investment. Um, there's just a lot of things that business leaders are looking at, um, when it comes into implementing AI and any kind of technology that often gets overlooked. And, and a big part of it's even just the communication, um, in the beginning, the strategy that's, um, put in place.

Mm-Hmm. And the context of digital transformation. SAP's been somewhat interesting because they always claim that the backend AppSec that you today have will continue to evolve and that's how you drive digital transformation.

And yet we've seen lots of people building custom software that using low-code, especially to drive various digital transformation initiatives. And ultimately those things connect using APIs and maybe connectors or whatever else is going on to drive some sort of process. And as you well know, and, uh, so does every other digital CXO, it can be a hit or miss process.

But do you think digital CXOs are thinking through the AI implications? Because theoretically every backend business process has some sort of AI agent performing some sort of task, and then there's front end ones that do something else and all these things have to come together and then eventually they're gonna have to interact with applications that have their own AI agents from somewhere else. And we might have a scenario where, you know, I'm using an application to buy something and you're using SAP to sell me something and our AI agents and bots will just fight it out till the point where, you know, we got a zero sum game.

I, I'm not sure how that's gonna play out, but um, I feel like digital CXOs need to sit down for a minute and think through this AI stuff 'cause it's gonna be everywhere, but I'm not sure they're doing that yet. Yeah. They really need to realize what is the purpose, what are their needs, and then choose the right tools.

And because it can become a whole lot of tools, like you said, really quickly, and there's so many different tools and so many different applications doing so many different things. And then the, the sprawl of all that and keeping track of it is gonna be a real issue. Well, we'll see how all this plays out.

ai, so we encourage you to check out that as well as digital c So, so I wanna shift gears now and talk about how it is evolving in the digital age. There's, uh, an interview up on digital CXO with one of the folks who from ServiceNow. And we're talking about how, you know, what used to be ITSM, IT service management is now basically become a digital employee experience management.

And the way it's described is, um, employees have a digital experience at work, it affects their productivity and, and it, you know, it changes the way you think about the delivery of applications and, but ultimately it changes the role of the IT team to be much more of a, um, a provider of an experience. And a lot of the verbiage we're using is similar to the verbiage that we use in customer experience and customer support and it's become that kind of thing. So is it becoming, uh, essentially a provider of services to customers that just happen to be employees?

Well, absolutely. We often overlook the employee experience, but it's just as critical as the customer experience that they both need to be, you know, having that ex that great experience to give the best service. I wonder, do you think employees are voting with their feet to go work for organizations that provide a better digital experience?

I mean, would you wanna work for somebody who is essentially asking you to cut and paste stuff from one application to another every day? Or do you want somebody who's gonna give you an experience at work that hopefully is less stressful, less toil, less boredom? And do you think companies are gonna start evaluating themselves based on that capability because otherwise the turnover's gonna get higher?

Um, I think you're absolutely right because while they may not be thinking to interview and ask those questions before they get the job, that they are looking at it once they get into, into the job. And if they're, if they're not enjoying the process and, and compared to a, a past job or what they're actually looking for and it it's all very inefficient and they're having to do a lot of mundane tasks, then they're gonna move on quickly. So I think companies will be looking at, um, all of their processes moving forward because it is becoming more of a competition and down the road that could be something, you know, potential employees think to ask ahead of time is about processes and efficiency.

Do you think our friends in it get that? And I'm asking the question 'cause they have a reputation for not really being the most, uh, sensitive souls in the world when it comes to the, uh, employee experience. They're basically, sometimes they're of the mindset that said, this is how the software works and you should adjust to it.

And I think what we're moving to is, uh, perhaps the software and the systems need to adjust more to the employees. Absolutely. And I think that it, um, you know, I always say it comes down to communication and it's very key in anything in any field is communicating.

What do the employees need, what's gonna improve processes, what's gonna make all the employees more efficient and wanna stay there. Now ServiceNow is betting that that's all gonna lead to consolidation. Their argument is is that we're gonna see all these applications kind of stacked on each other in a common database and common object model.

And it kind of sounds a lot like SAP on the backend, but their argument is these things are a little bit more than, uh, systems of records. Their, their workflows that wrap around the system of records each in your organization can evaluate that for themselves. But, um, do we have too many applications today and do we need to have a consolidation?

I feel like there's a SaaS app for everything and not to mention a few thousand on-premise AppSec and stuff up in the cloud. Is this whole thing just gotten outta control? Well it, it's easy to do.

I mean, even on a personal level it's easy to get out of a control. So of course I think businesses need to look and, you know, constantly evaluate year yearly what are they really using? What do they need?

What is the point of some of them and can they, can they get rid of 'em and cut costs and be more efficient? Alright. I think that there's gonna be some consolidation.

I think every time that we have a massive expansion. I think what happened is in that covid era, everybody built the SaaS app for every little thing they can imagine and now everybody's coming back to work and saying, none of these things are integrated with each other and it's kind of painful to work through these things. So I think, um, especially if the economy becomes, uh, more challenging, there's gonna be, well companies are gonna run out of funding in the first place.

Second place is, um, organizations are gonna say, Hey, there's just too many vendors involved in this process and we need to consolidate the number of vendors. So that may play to the strengths of whether it's ServiceNow or SAP as we were talking about earlier, or Microsoft for that matter. We'll see how it all plays out.

All right. Love to move to this next topic, which is an article, it's up on digital CXO where somebody was talking about, well in the digital age IT talent doesn't have to be within driving distance of the office or does it, 'cause it seems like it's an ongoing debate. Um, we see a lot of times where, um, companies are saying, everybody, you gotta come back into the office.

But a lot of the IT jobs doesn't seem to matter where you are. And by the way, once you get in the office, it turns out the company has five or six offices. So the IT team that is supporting an employee might be 3000 miles away anyway.

So what difference does it make if that it person is another thousand miles away and um, I don't know, pick, you know, somewhere in the middle of the country, and I know we talked about this a little bit over on uh, Textron AI with uh, Cisco and it was the same conversation about, well are you being shortsighted as a company? 'cause you're not taking advantage of all the talent that's out there. You're kind of limiting yourself to what's ever within a two hour commute.

And you know, those people don't really enjoy that sense of being forced into the office anyway. So what's your take on what's going on here? Absolutely.

So companies really are short sighting themselves if they're just looking for people within the vicinity because, you know, they have the whole world at this point at their fingertips to find the, the real talent that they're looking for with the skillset that they need. And the survey showed that over half of employees at this point would prefer to work remotely, whereas only 3% want to work back in the office. So if you want the best work being done, you should go with where the employees are the happiest and most comfortable and producing the better work.

And some of this issue about pushing folks back to the office simply about, um, the managers there don't know how to cope with a distributed workforce and or a workforce where people are not in their immediate presence all the time and you hear them complain about there's a lack of, um, innovation because we're not all in the same room talking about stuff. Or is it just simply, um, you know, they don't know how to keep track of productivity. So all they can think about is, you know, somebody showed up for nine 15 and they went home at five and hopefully, you know, x amount of paperwork was processed and it's just too old school thinking.

I'm sure it definitely is and I'm sure that many business leaders are uncomfortable and, and don't know the solution. But with a little bit of innovation in this day and age, it is very simple to bring everyone together, even from however far away they are. There's just so many different ways to do so.

Um, and, and maybe it does require certain jobs might, you know, require a meeting once a year or something where you can bring everybody together, um, and and do all those things that you felt you needed to do in person, but for the remainder of the time you should really be able to work from anywhere. I'm looking forward to that Harvard Business School study that looks at the productivity and their revenues of organizations and which ones had, um, hired people wherever they could find the best talent versus those that first forced everybody back into an office and to see, uh, what the implications of that are. I think there's a lot of people who in the covid era moved to some idyllic location that they liked and thought they were gonna be working remotely forever and they're gotten a rude notice from their boss saying, Hey, you need to move back or you're fired.

I think there's a lot of talent out there that can be, um, had as a result. Um, of course, you know, there's a lot of layoffs in the tech sector these days, but if you look at other vertical industries, hey, things are going gangbusters and there's a lot of demand for talent out there. So I would not, uh, necessarily expect that spite everybody saying we're moving everybody back to the office.

I think on a practical level, people are gonna be working from home. I mean, I don't know anybody, even if they're in the office who works nine to five anyway. I mean, especially in certain classes of jobs.

So I think there's more sound inferior here than reality. The reality's gonna be, to your point, we're gonna have a hybrid work style and some days you're gonna be working at seven o'clock at night to make up for something you had to do for the family at two o'clock in the afternoon. It's part and parcel of the lifestyle now, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Because I think where, whereas they might say everybody has to come back to the office, they might rewind when nobody does go back to the office and they just refuse because I think, you know, unfortunately, or fortunately I would say, you know, people have seen, you know, that they can do better if, you know, if the best work from where they're most comfortable and they can do it when they want to morning night around their schedules and they're realizing that they were wasting a lot of hours when they were in the office, um, pretending to be busy or just finding things to do and and not really being efficient. So, um, I think it's gonna be hard to pull people back even if they say they are.

All right, full disclosure, tech strong is based in Boca Raton where I am and Amanda's in Texas and it works out just fine. Alright. Um, I do wanna shift to something a little more fun.

Um, there's a story up on the site, uh, written by a guy named Frank Fazar. Yes, he is a relation and um, it's about a basketball that was granted using 3D techniques and has all kinds of interesting holes and ridges in it as a result be had fee for the low low price of, I think, what was it, $2,400, $2,500. Um, and now if you've gone to this sport good store anytime lately, I think a basketball's cost somewhere about, uh, 25 to 30 bucks these days.

So what is your sense of what's going on with 3D printing in general? It feels like, um, we make a lot of really expensive things here because we haven't figured out how to do this at scale and there was a time there when 3D printing was gonna, you know, transform manufacturing and basically it looks to me like, you know, we're making high-end gifts. Well, I think the goal right now, uh, with the basketball and, and maybe with a lot of 3D technology is more for, uh, you know, the big teams, uh, hoping that some big teams catch on with this.

Uh, and then, you know, just like with anything, once somebody catches on with it and uses it in a, you know, a large enough way, then that price will go down and maybe one day down the future we'll see that basketball being much more affordable. Uh, but right now I think it's more of a, a novelty and more of something for, you know, professional teams and because 3D printing can be pretty expensive, but, but once it can be mass produced, that price will go down. I'd be terrified to bring that ball to a playground in New York because I'd be like, the first minute I got a scuff on it, I'd be like, that was a $300 scuff.

Yeah. So I think it's kind of silly and um, um, most important thing is to remember the joy of playing sports in the first place. And it's not about the basketball or the sneakers or anything else.

All right, man, that's all we got. Wanna close this out? Yes.

Well, I wanna thank our audience for being here today and stay tuned Next week we're going to do this podcast on a weekly cadence and bring you all the latest in digital transformation and innovation. Thanks Mike. Alright, Thank you all.

And of course, you know, we talked about basketball, so you know, you have to make a reference to that, you know, uh, Michael Jordan quote, I think it is, you know, the, the, the shot you're always gonna miss is the one you never take. Right. Hey, thanks everybody.

Take care.