It Takes a Village – Techstrong Research Review EP 24

Hi, everybody. Mike Rothman here, general manager of Textron Research with another episode of the Textron Research Review. It's been a couple of weeks, Mitch and I, we've been, we've been rolling everywhere.

We were in, you know, Boca for an executive meeting, Mitch, and we'll talk about, uh, an analyst conference that he just went to. So, uh, first review that we've, we've done in a couple of weeks. Mitch, my, my partner in crime, Mitch Ashley, how are you?

You know, things are, things are going okay. The last couple of weeks. I'm doing well.

I put some, uh, new tires on, on the, uh, the van crossing the country. I'm pretty soon gonna cross the pond. I'm not sure that that'll go in the van, but, you know, hitting the road again.

So well, and we've had so many conferences that, um, our video team has been at, so it's really been a logistical, how do you, you know, keep, keep everything connected. And that's part of why we haven't gotten together to, to record exactly the session. So it's good to be back doing it with you, Mike.

It It is, it is. And, uh, I'm, I'm humping the, uh, Pelican Brewing Company today. See That.

Okay. Oregon New Advertiser. Okay.

Yeah. New advertiser on, on, you know, great group pub, uh, on the coast of Oregon overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It really is fantastic.

Um, so if you're in that area, definitely go check out, uh, Pelican Brewing Company. Um, but that's neither few nor there. Right?

Uh, it's more one of my collection of, of your shirts that I, that I have pretty much all over the, uh, the country. But I don't have a problem I can stop at, at, at any moment, so I'm sure you can. Yeah, Absolutely.

Uh, so what we gonna talk about today, um, you know, what, what's interesting is, and, and Mitch, I were just chatting a little bit about, you know, kind of what companies have to do to more effectively deliver solutions when we're in, you know, a downturn, right? When there are economic headwinds, uh, we're facing, we don't have the funding that we've had, we don't have access to the resources that we've had. Um, you know, in the go-go days, right?

It wasn't a matter of, Hey, just hire a whole mess of people and we'll raise more money or we'll sell some bonds because, you know, kind of money's pretty much free from that standpoint, not so much anymore, right? So you were adjusted in New York with Alan at the Coforge, um, analyst conference. So definitely one, I mean, I'm sure a lot of folks don't even know what, what Coforge is.

Uh, and it's not really necessarily about them, right? It's really about this idea of how do you start to leverage systems integrators as a way to start really addressing the fact that we can't, you know, kind of deliver a lot of these solutions internally anymore. Yeah.

I I think it's that. I think it's also, um, a lot more, um, kind of fixed price bids we need to guarantee have a higher success rate on, on completion of our projects. And sometimes that, that is a strategy for doing that, or at least some in systems integration will sign up for fixed big contracts.

Of course, then you're managing to the scope very tightly, but, you know, you do get some output. Yeah. Alan and I were, or were invited, I think you were busy, uh, with some other things to, uh, go up to that analyst conference and, and I, I hadn't heard of Co Forage before.

It's actually through a contact of Allens that recently went there. You know, it's a billion dollar company based out of India. They do most of their work in the uk, their biggest projects, but they do projects all over the world in, uh, in finance and insurance and transportation.

Uh, the big three. What what, what stood out to me is, you know, they give the normal pitch, they give the analysts, like, like folks do, and touting their success. Of course, they've had a significant growth, I think it was from about 400 to a billion or hundred million in the last, I think six years or so.

So it's a relatively short period of time. So something's going on there that's, that's going, right, right. And, and they taught their industry expertise as one of their differentiators.

It's just, it's not the old Anderson model of, you know, oh, here's the new group. Graduation was happened. We got a group, new group of kids showing up on our project from Anderson.

Right? I remember those days when I was at E D s, but I think what it signifies to Mike is a, a big emphasis on we can't do it all ourselves. IT organizations or business units for that matter, some of these things are big lifts, right?

I remember, I remember the days of you wanted to be the third manager on the project cuz the first two got killed after the project got behind and went over budget. So you can't run those same risks anymore. You've gotta have a higher probability of success and maybe, maybe bringing in some expertise, expertise that you don't have.

I mean, there's lots of reasons for using a si for doing that kind of project work. I'm have, I know you've had a lot of experience with I, I I have. And, and, and what's interesting is you have a lot of different options for how you solved the problem, right?

There were companies like a coforge and, and we pro and y you know, kind of a, a a dozen others that are, you know, at that scale that can take on, again, very significant, um, systems, you know, just really enterprise type systems and really, you know, kind of take that from cradle of grave, you know, hundreds of folks and all sorts of architects and you know, and, and you know, those are really large scale projects, right? But there are also much more targeted integrators that focus on things like a Salesforce or, um, y you know, Workday, uh, or some of the other, you know, big SaaS initiatives, uh, that folks have who are gonna start seeing a lot of 'em. They're focusing on ai.

We see a lot of 'em that focus on security architecture and mdr, uh, in order to, you know, again, provide both expertise and resources that are really hard to get out there in the field. So it, it, it, it, it, again, it does feel like we're a little bit in, you know, the time machine, you know, whether we wanted to go back to 1998, whether we want to go back to, um, you know, 2006, 2007, uh, you know, where we had to start figuring out, you know, am I, you know, is it business process outsourcing? Then I gave way to out tasking and, you know, do I want the big thing and then, you know, try to give it to one company to do it.

Uh, obviously with a huge amount of risk. Do I wanna break it up and become the general contractor or amongst many different providers? Um, and now that we're all moving towards these SaaS and, and cloud platforms, you have these specialty companies that are coming up with an expertise in a w s or an expertise in Azure or G C P, uh, or any of these different SaaS platforms with not just people that are expert in that group, but technologies, right?

You know, work kits or, or toolkits that they have that ease and facilitate the, um, you know, the project, right? They've got, you know, kind of design patterns. They've got, you know, code snippets, they've got all sorts of stuff that can help you accelerate, you know, your project, uh, on that front.

So again, it really is an interesting time in that, you know, do I want to just give it to somebody and have them deal with the whole thing? Or y you know, do I really want to kind of figure out what targeted expertise will help me, uh, from the standpoint of, of this project? And then, you know, start to manage that accordingly.

Well, and there's definitely a tier of companies who tend to hire the larger si, right? And, and the, the relationships are long. I mean, you, it's kind of once in the door, they're there for a while.

And I know the old model, at least when, when I was in that part of the industry, it, it was more body shop, right? It was just growing people at it, right? Because these are all new kids outta college and great talent, but you know, they're learning why I was One of 'em too.

I worked for E and Y back in the day, so Exactly. I think most of us started that way back in the day. Um, and but they, but they tend to, to, um, they tend to have longer term relationships.

So once you're in there and you're helpful, you're now part of the CIOs, the CTOs, the CISO strategy, right? For part of at least how you deliver this. And I think that's built on success, right?

So you gotta prove yourself. They're, they're interested in, and, and there's not plenty, there's plenty of other people that have to, to step in and take it on. But I think your point about it's, it's not the PE just the quantities of people they bring, it's the experiences that they can leverage from what they've done with you and other people.

And that the fact, are they keeping up on how they can apply technologies? Cuz the themes I took away from that conference, the comfort conference, was we were looking for more efficient ways to do things. It's not just business process engineering.

It's like, I need a measurable difference in how fast we can respond to delivering this service, right? Uh, there was a trucking company CIO who was there, I dunno if I gotta mention the name, but anyway, he is like, we need to double the revenue, but I don't need to add twice as many, have twice as many, um, shipping terminals, right? Where the, all the trucks arrive to get their loads of stuff.

I need to do the same with what I've got. How do we do that? How do we make that more efficient?

You know, that's the kind of challenges I think at least in one category people are asking for, right? Yeah. Well, again, I mean, I think that, that everybody's trying to figure out how to, how to grow revenue without, you know, kind of increasing, you know, their cost base in, in line with that.

Uh, we've gotta become more efficient. We can't, you know, again, invest ahead of the curve, uh, on a number of these things. And, and I think really the point is we've gotta leverage other folks experience in doing that.

Mm-hmm. Right? Sometimes it's through an s i sometimes students target service provider.

Sometimes it's through as much as I, you know, hate to say it, you know, folks like, uh, Boston Consulting or McKinsey that will come in and, and again, you know, bring your checkbook, but the reality is, you know, they're gonna come at it from a business analysis standpoint that really helps you, you know, understand your business, uh, from that standpoint. So, so again, now it, it, it's hard sometimes to, you know, make that decision, Hey, you wanna bring somebody in from the outside because it is such a constrained economic environment. But in a lot of cases, you know, you can get a multiple of that investment, especially now, because now's the time to start making those, you know, types of investments start, you know, funding some of those projects so that when growth, you know, happens again, whether it's in six months, 12 months, 18 months, nobody knows when we hit that inflection point, you as an organization want to be ready, right?

The C T O and the c i o of that organization want to be ready. And that's a lot of what, you know, kind of our digital transformation efforts and, and research, uh, really focus on, which is, you know, how do you, you know, kind of make sure that you're asking the right questions, right? How do you make sure that you've got, you know, kind of the right staff and expertise in place so that you can, you know, start driving a lot of these initiatives?

And, you know, I don't want to conflate it with, you know, DevOps, right? Oh, digital transformation. That just means we're gonna move towards agile and DevOps.

This is much more about, you know, how you're transitioning your business in a digital way, right? How you delivering your value to your customers in a way that is more effective, uh, a way that is more leverageable, a way that is cheaper to deliver for you and easier for your customers to consume. Those are the kind of things that I think are important to really spend some time thinking about now.

But aas, you know, a lot of folks are still trying to figure out, uh, I had to cut, you know, kind of 20% of my staff. What the hell do I do now? Right?

And so, you know, you've got a whole bunch of things. And you know what, this is another example where you gotta, you know, be able to chew gum and tap your belly at the same time, because if you can't do both, you know, you'll be flat-footed when we do recover because you'll just, yeah. You'll be much more efficient, but you won't be positioned for growth at that point.

Well, and that's a good point because, you know, oftentimes cost cutting is just purely that, but seems to be most often it's we're cutting, but we're also gonna reinvest some dollars other ways from what we were doing, right? So let's pivot and do some, take a different approach or do some things that we haven't been able to do cuz we just weren't getting to them. I think the, the other thing that's kinda really changed, Mike, is people are th thinking in, even though it's not DevOps and agile, they're thinking in business strategy in terms of I need results in six weeks, 12 weeks, three months, you know, six months increments.

I don't need it three years from now. I don't need a freaking e r P system that's seven year years to implement, right? That they told me would take three.

We can't do that, right? They're, the, the businesses looking for immediate gains is on a track towards something larger, not just sign me up for the journey, you know, for the project from hell that never ends, Right? You can't, right?

I mean, you, you know, because the reality is it'll be your success or maybe even your success or successor, you know, if it takes multiple years to deliver on these things. Whi which again, I, I think the, the whole agile mindset really fits into that approach as well, because it's not, you know, and again, think about a, a big e r p thing back in the day, you know, you were, you were implementing SAP on-prem and, and, you know, it was a, a two to three year project y you know, that looked an awful lot like waterfall, right? And now that, you know, kind of, we are transcending a lot of that.

We can build in and, and, and look at a, a, a, a fine finance tech stack or a MarTech stack or a sales tech stack where we're putting these pieces together, you know, kind of piecemeal, we're doing one thing, we're getting that over the finish line, then we're adding in a module, we're adding in another module. And that's where a lot of these platform players start to come in. Again, your Salesforce is, your workday, is, you know, kind of a lot of these that, you know, kind of, you build incremental service now Exactly.

On top of service. Now, of course, that's a great one. Um, you know, where you're, you're building, you know, these incremental capabilities on top of the platform because you do have to reduce your risk, uh, relative to, you know, any of these big initiatives.

I mean, again, we just don't have time to mess around with it. And nobody has the tolerance, as you just said, Mitch, for, you know, a three year limitation plan. Yeah.

That's, that's, that's shivers thinking about that I wanted to mention too, uh, Mike Ard, chief content officer with techstrong just came back from ServiceNow's user conference. So there's a bunch of videos SCR interviews up on, I have a chance to see all of 'em, but I've seen a few and there's some great stuff up there backing up what we're saying, right? Um, so check that out on text string tv.

The, the other, the other trend or thing that I saw occurring, at least in this analyst conference, is a big emphasis on data, data analytics and platforms for data, right? How do you get AC access to all this stuff and how do you start to use it, not just in some giant data lake, but how do you use it for even ai, which is another big theme, uh, and not have to, even in generative ai, right? There's different models, different LLMs for different kinds of problem solving.

Do you have a partner? Do you have somebody who knows that and says, I just need the right data to train in this. I already have a model that's good for your website, another model for how to do, um, you know, q question and answer around troubleshooting or whatever it might be, uh, that I can start to train with your data.

Okay, that's a headstart. Just knowing that and knowing how to get going with the right duals, uh, that maybe already pre-built, right? Yeah, for sure, for sure.

And again, it's just, it, it's a very interesting time in that we just have to figure out how to be more efficient with a lot of these initiatives. Uh, you, you can't, again, you can't stop innovation, right? If you stop innovation, your business dies.

It's as simple as that, right? So, so we have to figure out a way, and again, using, you know, some help from, from these different folks, uh, getting, you know, some perspectives on, you know, how other folks in the industry, uh, are doing things. Uh, all of these are are key tactics that we're gonna have to use, uh, in order to, you know, continue to move forward again, knowing that we've got constrained resources for the next whatever it is, right?

12, 18, 24 months, uh, before companies are really gonna feel, uh, comfortable in, in hitting the gas and starting to, to increase their level of investment. Yep. Precisely an important part of the market.

So thanks to the folks who invite us to this kinda thing. We You bet. And, and, and one other plug, you know, kinda getting back to, to the point about data, right?

Um, God, I wonder if somebody would be having a conference that's focused on data ops sometime soon, maybe August. Um, August. Well, that's another thing.

It's obviously a very timely topic. It's something that you, you know, there is just a ton of interest on. And, and we will be doing our data ops conference, I believe in August, so make sure you sign up for that because there'll be a whole bunch of research relating to how to really leverage data to further, you know, kind of the, the business objectives of a lot of these digital transformation efforts.

So, uh, so check that out before we wrap up On this August 16th. com. Can find out a lot more August.

And if you're interested in speaking too, I know they're still accepting, uh, you know, applications for talks and things like that, so you, and I'm sure we'll be doing some stuff there too. There's some really good things happening, so I'm excited about about doing that with you. For Sure, For sure.

Um, I, I, one thing I wanna put a plug in for, I don't know if everyone following Techstar research also follows the pulse meter activity that we have going on. This is a motion that Mike and I and our team do, uh, with, with different partners. Sometimes it's like a, a AWS and their partner community.

Sometimes it's directly with a technology supplier where we are right now, this moment, um, taking the pulse, if you will, from our half a billion visitors to across our sites and videos, content, et cetera, um, on certain topics around whether it's adoption of something or digital transformation of that, or, uh, what the barriers are to something. Yeah. And this is data that we're collecting like today, tomorrow, next week.

So the, they're, they're short turnaround kind of things. I think there's some good insights there for folks that are like, okay, we're thinking cloud native. What are the questions I should be asking?

Well, looks like the tech and research folks have done some stuff like that. Let me go check that out. And, and For each one of the pulse meters, we do provide our perspective on how that impacts you as the audience, as the reader, as the practitioner.

That has to make sense, uh, of all these things. So it's not just y you know, yes, it's, it's in a very clean y you know, graphical infographic type of, of format. But there is, you know, quick research depth there for how do I apply this data to my problems today.

So it is pretty effective. And, and we do a webinar with each one of these pulse meters, so we kind of dig into the data, uh, with, you know, the sponsor and, and one of the folks from the, from the textual research team. Uh, and, uh, again, it's pretty effective and, and we have a whole mess of them coming up.

So, so keep an eye on starting in in mid-June. So, uh, I think next week or the week after, we start with, with a couple of these and it'll go through, uh, most of the summer. So we've been, you know, just a lot of activity around, uh, the pulse because you've probably seen, uh, the polls that we kind of put up on the website, uh, pretty much, uh, every day cuz we're asking somebody about something.

Uh, and we've got a number of them, you know, again, kicking off that that'll happen throughout, uh, the summer and the rest of the year. So, uh, lots of activity along those lines. We've got some work that we're doing for the CAPP space and security, and that's really kind of a conglomeration of workload and container and CSPM and, uh, a lot of other markets that are coming together.

So we've got, uh, some research, you know, we're gonna be initiating over the next couple of weeks, uh, in that area as well. So a lot going on. All right, lots struggling Lot.

com, So, okay. They're all within our resource resource library. So, good, Mitchell, great, uh, insights.

Again, I think from that perspective, everybody has to start thinking about how they can y you know, get some help. Uh, and funny, we're gonna do a cyber conference in November and the theme is gonna be, you know, help is on the way. Uh, right?

Mm-hmm. Cause we can't do it all ourselves. And this is a microcosm based on applications, but when we think about security, it really is the same thing as well.

So we can't do things all by ourselves. We need some help. So with that, we will wrap up, uh, unless you add another part, I was gonna see if we can get the rights to the Beatles song help, you know, we'll build that.

Uh, yeah, I, I'm pretty sure I will. You don't think so? No.

Music budget may not allow for something like that. Okay, well maybe next time well listen. If you wanted to bust out the guitar, I'm not sure anybody would, would rat on you cause Yeah.

Yes. Just send the royalty checks this way. Okay.

Mi Mitchell is actually, you know, pretty good and talented guitar player, so maybe we'll have to come and and do a little guest. Yeah, you'll have to come and see if I play. So with that, we will sign off for this week's, uh, text from research review.

Uh, it'll be up soon and then we will be back in a couple of days with the next one cuz we are gonna get back into a, uh, into a weekly cycle on this. Get the rhythm going. All right, thanks everybody.

Thanks Mike.