Jeff Standridge (Intro):
Are you ready to change the trajectory of your business and see massive improvements? Each week we’ll share strategies and practices to generate sustained results and long lasting success in your organization. Welcome to the Innovation Junkies Podcast.
Jeff Standridge:
Hey, guys. Jeff Standridge here. Welcome to another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, I’m so glad to be back. Jeff Amerine here.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah. So we’re going to shift gears, Jeff. We’ve been talking about innovation readiness as part of the GrowthDX and the solutions stack that we bring to organizations. We’re going to now shift into that last domain. The sixth of six domains in the GrowthDX, the strategic growth diagnostic, called digital readiness. So how about we hop into that? You want to take the lead?
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah. Sounds good. And, you know, you recall when we were putting together the GrowthDX originally, that was one of the things that we added at the end because we were hearing at that time, a couple of years back, every executive we talked to in a midsize or large company was like, we gotta to do something about digital transformation. And to some extent you could get lost in, Oh, that’s just more kind of corporate speak, jargon. So what the heck are we really talking about when we talk about digital transformation? What’s it all about from your point of view?
Jeff Standridge:
Well, first of all, I think it is about both digital and data. I think inclusive in that word is data as part of a digital transformation. And so it’s, you know, in a very small nutshell, it’s about actually looking at what you have, looking at what the industry has and what’s happening in the industry. We just finished an episode on OpenAI and the disruptive nature of AI and machine learning technologies. To look, looking at what’s out there, looking at what makes sense to incorporate into your business, and then building a transformation plan to actually get there. No different than if you were building a cultural transformation plan, a profit transformation plan, or a business model transformation plan. It’s knowing where you are, where you’re trying to go, what’s available out there, and then bridging the gap between the two.
Jeff Amerine:
So you got to map those processes and you really need to have an inventory of what you have today. And then you try to find out what are the gaps that represent, you know, good benchmarks so that you know, from the good benchmarks, so that you know kind of where you stand. And one other key point that comes out of that is a lot of times when people go down this road of digital, they think that they’ve got to have a system for everything. And a lot of times they’ll even purchase systems in advance of really understanding how a process flow will work, where they might decide where there’s really no value add, there’s no ROI on that. All we have to do is maybe change an existing manual process and we can get the efficiency without buying an expensive system. So talk a little bit about that point.
Jeff Standridge:
So yeah, I’ve been involved and I actually led internal IT for a very large technology company. And it was kind of interesting because we spent all of our money on customer technology but didn’t spend a lot on our internal technology. But we were the best at buying a package, multi-million dollar system and implementing it. And in those large enterprise ERP types of systems, the processes that come out of the box are based upon best practices from hundreds of companies. Yet we would take that ERP packaged system and we would do a custom implementation such that we had effectively spent multimillion dollars to buy the system and then another multimillion dollar to actually customize it to our own broken processes, so to speak. So really understanding, you know, and I tell this to people all the time, if they’ve got a new process and they’re looking for technology to execute the process, I tell them all the time, run it on spreadsheets and word docs for the first year because it’s going to be a completely different process after you’ve run it manually multiple times, then you can go and figure out how to apply technology to it.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, that’s right. And there’s also can be this affliction sometimes where you’re bringing in a new system and people are really in a corporate setting, maybe inundated with systems to do various functions that have been adapted. And if you throw one more thing on, you’re really in some ways maybe adding to the misery, right? It’s just one more thing that’s not adding a bunch of value. So part of that process as well is what’s it going to replace and do we really need to replace those things or is this just going to be one more thing where you’re not really going to get the productivity. Great example would be and I’d be interested in your thoughts on this is when Meaningful Use came around as part of the implementation of electronic medical records, everybody thought, Oh, this is going to be fantastic. All the doctors’ productivity is going to go way up. And the doctors were about to lose their minds because it was one more thing they had to do and it wasn’t really adding to the time that they could spend with patients.
Jeff Standridge:
And it’s interesting you brought that up because I was just getting ready to say EMRs, EHRs, not only is it not adding to the time they spend with patients, it is adding to the time that they spend away from their families. They’re going home at night and having dinner if they can, and then working into the wee hours of the morning actually getting their medical records up to date, because a lot of their compensation is tied to productivity, which gets measured by actual records in a system, right? And, you know, the complete lack of efficiency, the number of clicks that have to occur to get a simple medical record entered is really phenomenal. Now, there are some technologies that are coming along that’s helping that one was a very manual technology called a scribe, where they would basically just hire people to sit out at a desk and listen in on the conversations and actually transcribe those notes. Now they’re actually back to our AI example. There are actual AI tools that can be loaded on a mobile phone, like a smartphone that will edit out all of the, all of the banter, the non-medical banter that occurs back and forth and using a growing dictionary and a growing thesaurus of language, natural language processing, it will actually write the progress notes and dictate those into the EMR.
Jeff Amerine:
The speech-to-text stuff has gotten better and better. Yeah, I mean, it seems like that is a place where it could be a real big timesaver. And one other thing that I know I hear you talk a lot about as we think about our own innovation processes is the system implementation is something that is sometimes separated from the behavior change that’s required in the organization. So it’s like, I never will forget this is some years back. Large organization. It’s like “we’re going to standardize on SAP”. And after the second CIO of that business was fired because it wasn’t really happening, they realized you’ve got to drive the behavioral change to get people around the system. At the same time, they can’t be done separately. Talk a little bit about that.
Jeff Standridge:
So most CTOs and most technologists, technical project managers and project executives that are running these large system implementations are completely disconnected from the organizational psychologist and those who are responsible for driving sustained organizational change over time. And so getting those two functions, communicating any time that you’re looking to create any form of long-term organizational change or technology change or implementation is absolutely critical. You know, we’ve seen that over and over and over with large Salesforce automation systems, whether that’s Salesforce or a different type of application. You know, I go back to the I go back to the adage that rules without consequences are merely suggestions. And so, you know, we have this, we’re going to roll out this neat new process, this neat new application, this neat new tool. But we don’t spend any time whatsoever actually selling it internally to the people who are going to be using it and helping them get the most out of it so that they’re motivated and incentivized to use it versus feeling it as just another pile on.
Jeff Amerine:
Right, right. And if you don’t do a good job with that behavioral change, some of those people that would have been open to it can end up being in the saboteur camp. They’re not going to do it. They’re not going to be compliant. It’s just one more thing, you know, etc. etc.
Jeff Standridge:
Just instead of quitting and leaving the organization, they quit and stay.
Jeff Amerine:
Exactly. Which is, you know, as we used to say, retired on active duty. Right. The roadies. But another big consideration that enterprises think about and it has to do with digital readiness is for the longest time everything had to be behind the firewall and on premise versus in the cloud because there was all these risks associated with stuff being in the cloud. Handicap that a little bit for us. How do you think about that today? How’s that work?
Jeff Standridge:
You know, so today there are I don’t know the number, but the vast I believe the vast majority of enterprise systems now have either an on premise or a cloud based solution. And I would say even a slight majority have gone to the cloud based route. You know, the cybersecurity capabilities, you know, that exist today, the monitoring capabilities that exist today, the actual cost reductions from actually, both personnel and technology cost reductions from having to have something on premise, just doesn’t make sense anymore. For most things. For most things.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, I agree with you. It’s amazing how much stuff has gone out in the cloud and that kind of is a good segway to the next idea of how to think about cybersecurity and cybersecurity insurance. And, you know, there’s a lot to that. There are good systems and best practices and updates and patches. And as the organization grows, somebody needs to have that chief information security officer role. But what are your thoughts around that? What do you see and what are the risks associated with not being prepared in those areas?
Jeff Standridge:
Well, the risks are you get your entire business shut down for a period of time until you pay the ransom. And, you know, I’ve seen that happen to hospitals. I’ve seen that happen to a number of organizations. And I actually sit on the board of a large health system. And back when, gosh, it was probably 2017 or 2018 when there were some cyber terrorists, so to speak, going in, shutting down health systems. And then they were demanding ransoms that were right below the deductibles of the vast majority of cybersecurity insurances because they knew they wouldn’t refer them to the insurance company. And the insurance company then wouldn’t investigate. And so, you know, we just sat down and said, you know, we need to do a full cyber review of our entire network system. And thank God we did, because what we found was that, you know, we had 20 year old network switches and had a number of opportunities, needed to make some investments, but had a number of opportunities to actually upgrade our systems in order to not only make them function better and perform better, but actually to increase the the the hardness of of them, if you will.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, and, you know, there’s some interesting platforms and tools out there. Companies like Breachbits comes to mind as one that will do an overall vulnerability assessment. It will give you a risk score so you know where you rate versus other companies that are similar so that you have some idea of how much is enough protection and those sorts of things, are, you just, it can be an existential threat, the kind of thing that can knock you out of business if you’re not clear.
Jeff Standridge:
I’m a strong proponent of focusing on your core. And if IT is not your core business, outsource it. Get some you know, and another organization I was involved in, which was health care related, everything was in-source. And when they got to got to looking at their talent, you know, they they had been sitting on on sitting there in the in the IT room without any real development, not really up to speed on the on the newest technologies that are out there. And there was a lot of turnover because they could go somewhere else. And you know, when we started looking at their organizations, we found that, look, it makes a whole lot more sense to to keep your your super users or your clinical specialists, for instance, who are kind of the the the nurse techs, nurse technologists or the medical technologists that use the technology. Keep those, but outsource everything else and upgrade your talent, upgrade your systems, upgrade your networks, upgrade your cybersecurity, and have someone or a small organization or a medium or large organization that does that for a living to actually protect your crown jewels, so to speak.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, it’s so true. And it’s I mean, it also gets the ideas of compliance and privacy. And in health care, you’ve got the HIPPA rules that you’ve got to follow. There’s the emerging idea that individuals’ data is their data. And so you’ve got things in Europe like GDPR, these privacy standards. That’s not going away. If people get more and more concerned that nefarious actors will figure out ways to break into enterprises of any size, for profit, nonprofit, take their data and then do something terrible with it. So that’s another area where if you’re going to make that digital transformation, that’s got to be a front and center play as well.
Jeff Standridge:
Oh, I’ll tell you. I mean, I received a call this week in the PCI, that’s payment card industry standards, right, for people processing credit cards or data related to credit cards. You know, I got a call from American Airlines, not from my Citibank Visa card, but which usually is front and center. They are very quick. They’ve got a great fraud detection department and they’re usually on point to call me. But I got a call from American Airlines that said, just want to confirm that you booked a trip from Dallas to Seattle today because that didn’t feel right to us. And so that the monitoring capabilities and the sensitivity that’s out there today is pretty phenomenal at being able to ferret out that kind of nefarious activity and be able to put a stop to it.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah. And one other thing I’d say about all that, and it’s so it relates to privacy and it relates to the overall cybersecurity realm is the physical security and the social engineering that can happen when people make attacks, whether they’re insiders or outsiders. So being able to trust and compartmentalize your data, but trust people to have the right kind of administrative controls and having good internal audits and all that super important because a lot of times the biggest threat are the ones that are inside the company that may have an ax to grind or may be disgruntled or there may be something of value that they want to take. And so it’s not is the message is not to be overly paranoid, but to be careful and to be diligent and to follow these best practices.
Jeff Standridge:
Very good. This has been another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast, talking about digital readiness. Thanks for joining.
Jeff Amerine:
See you next time.
Jeff Amerine (Outro):
Feedback from listeners like you helps us create outstanding content. So if you like this episode, be sure to rate us or leave a review. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to get the latest growth and innovation strategies. Thanks for tuning in to the Innovation Junkies Podcast.