Hosted By
This session discusses the “silent drag on productivity” caused by digital sprawl and the proliferation of SaaS applications in organizations. Key points include:
Isaac Sacolick:
Greetings everyone. Welcome to this week’s Coffee with Digital Trailblazers. We are started giving everybody a few seconds to join. I could see LinkedIn is having a little bit more of a delay than usual, so I’m just going to give this a few more seconds. I don’t see it on my screen. It says the event will start soon, but on the main screen it says it started. It’s really interesting how this works. I’m going to do a refresh here to see if that fixes it
Joe Puglisi:
On in and it’s got a count of six people.
Isaac Sacolick:
Yeah. Okay, so we got a quorum going. Greetings, everyone. Thank you for coming back. We skipped last week’s coffee hour for the US Memorial Day holiday, trying to give everybody a chance to kick off their summer, and it’s great to see some repeating folks here. Hello, Chris. Thank you for joining. John, it’s great to see you. David. Thank you for joining. There’s Joe saying hello to everybody. I will say hello to everybody too. We’re just going to give everybody a few seconds to join this episode and our discussion on the silent drag on productivity navigating digital sprawl. This is a recurring theme here where we talk about how do we bring technologies together? How do we help make our employees more efficient? How do we connect our data? How do we do things in a more secure way? Hello, Steve. Thank you for joining. Hello, Dennis and Heather.
Heather, you’re welcome to join us on stage. Thank you for joining this week and I’m going to give it a couple more minutes. I do want to introduce today our episode is sponsored by QuickBase. I’ll have a little bit more about QuickBase later in the show, but we’re talking a lot about productivity. It’s coming up a ton because of the entire AI story, how generative AI is letting us code better, how generative AI is letting us do content better, how agentic AI is bridging, prompting into our workflows and all that great capability is sitting on top of our technical mess, all of the different spreadsheets that exist out there, all the swivel chairs that people are doing to be able to bring workflow, connect workflow from one system to another. Every time I do an episode around this topic, I tried to get some research out there.
I’m going to paste this in the common stream in just a moment, but the latest research I have is companies, small companies are typically having around 32 SaaS applications, mid-size companies as many as 61, and companies with over a thousand employees have on average 200 SaaS applications. And so when people ask why am I entering data into tools? Why am I working across three different systems? Why do I have to export data into spreadsheets? Why do I have to do things in multiple places and why can’t I keep my employees informed? Along with all the other operational and security risks, we get into this conversation of is there a better way to do this? Is there a better way to connect our employees? Is there a better way to improve productivity and address the digital sprawl? Again, folks today my sponsor is QuickBase. I’ll have a little bit more about QuickBase today during the show and I do want to introduce Christian Pots who I’ve known for a few years now.
Christian Potts is the director of public relations over at QuickBase, but I know him from doing a ton of other things there at QuickBase and in general, and so I’m thrilled to have you join us as our special guest. Christian, I want to talk about, start off by just talking about the fact that AI is getting all the buzz, but when we talked about this is more than just ai, that’s helping productivity and there’s more than just issues, more than enough issues around how we’re using technology today. There are drags on productivity, so I’m just interested in your perspective. I know QuickBase calls this the gray work, so tell me a little bit about the gray work and what’s the impact particularly in industries like construction and manufacturing. Hello, Christian, welcome to the floor.
Christian Potts:
Thank you, Isaac. I’m really excited to be here. This has been a long time coming, so yeah, you introduced gray work, but first I want to address kind of I guess maybe the first part of your question about ai, which is it’s probably the easiest sort of takeaway from this is AI is being used and we’ve done research on this now three years running where we’ve been tracking how much AI is being used, not just by knowledge workers who are creatives or people who are developing software, but by every industry. And what we’ve seen is that AI is definitely up and it’s not just up in people using it every couple of weeks or every month or something like that. We’ve got data that shows over the last year it’s gone from being used by 21% of people in those sort of operations heavy industries to 52% are using it every single day to do something in their workflows.
So the cat’s out of the bag when it comes to ai. But the sort of operative part of what you’re talking about here, which I think is really instructive, is this great work piece. So for those folks who maybe aren’t familiar with the term, about three years ago, QuickBase started, we started to look into this topic of what we call great work. We kept hearing over and over from customers that there was a set of things that they were doing every single day that just seemed to be moving them further and further away from getting work done. And sometimes these were collaboration based things. So for example, they just couldn’t get ahold of someone in the field or they weren’t able to effectively communicate with the shop floor or sometimes these were software based things where let’s say they were using a particular project management tool or a particular data entry tool and they were the only ones who had access to it and therefore they weren’t able to take that tool and share that across the organization or across the project team or sometimes these were compliance things, particularly governance where they were finding themselves trying to reconcile multiple data sets from multiple spreadsheets and multiple other Google Sheets tools and things like that.
And each of these things were just sort of presenting these obstacles that they were having to find ways around every single day and that work, that is work, that is what great work is, and that’s something that people have been spending upwards of like a quarter of their work week on every single week we’re talking like 11, 12, 20 hours a week that they’re spending this stuff down. So this is really that silent dragon productivity that you’re talking about. It’s just lurking underneath everything and once you see it and once you understand what it is, you see it everywhere. And that’s been the real eyeopener I think for a lot of the customers we certainly work with, but I think a lot of the other folks, even like your cell eyes, when we first talked first started talking about this term, there was an aha moment that went on. I think for both of us. We were like, oh yeah, this is everywhere. This isn’t just a big company problem or a small company problem. This is an everybody problem and an everywhere problem.
Isaac Sacolick:
Yeah, I think it’s actually, it’s more easily seen in some smaller companies, but it’s a bigger and larger magnitude problem mid and larger companies. And what I find is when you get down into the depths of how people are working outside of common workflows, we know common workflows in accounts payable and accounts receivable and common workflows in hr, common workflows in marketing and sales. When you get down into what really makes the company operate, there’s a lot of business process there that cross teams that cross UIs and just an enormous supply of SaaS applications that have come up over the years to start filling in some of those gaps. And some of them do great jobs in terms of their experience and solving a particular problem, but they end up solving one step of a bigger piece of a problem. And then flash forward 2, 3, 4 years later, I’m going to hear a story from John next that just talks about exactly this problem of hundreds of applications in relatively small organizations that are just impossible to manage. John, I’d love to hear your story around this.
John Patrick Luethe:
Hi Isaac. Thank you for having me up here. And this is such a real problem and I’ve seen it at the last two companies I’ve been at with a proliferation of sa and it’s so easy for somebody to have a problem and get on and search and find a piece of software that they can sign up with their credit card to solve that problem that they’re working on. And what happens is people on different teams, each team will start using that piece of software that does the same exact thing as that one of the other teams in the company will use. And pretty soon we have hundreds of pieces of software that are being purchased individually on people’s credit cards and then expensed into the company. And so what happens is it causes so many problems because you can have hundreds of pieces of software and the teams can’t collaborate with the other teams. It costs a ton of money and people often stop using this software, but they continue to pay for it. And then there’s some real security issues because a lot of times since they haven’t gone through it, they’re not using single sign-on to access these things. So when people leave the company, they still have access to this stuff. And so it’s a real risk for data leaking and other bad things happening. And so I’ve seen this in my last two companies. It’s a real issue.
Isaac Sacolick:
John, do you want to go deeper into your story?
John Patrick Luethe:
So what happen is we get into an audit and they started asking us about what software do we use? And then so really answer this question, we start finding out that we have more software than we thought we had, and each time we started making a list of every piece of software we could find in the company. And then to do that, we really had to partner with the accounting team and start looking at what are people expensing in? And we would based off that and looking at the expense reports we would categorize every time somebody did an expense report saying that this is the software or this is an IT tool, we would build a list and then we’d find out who signed up for that, how much are we paying on a monthly basis and when’s a renewal date? And that would give us information on when we can start going to cancel these things.
And so then we would work with the different teams and we would say, okay, you use this tool and this other team uses that tool. How can we get all of the whole company onto one tool? And so then we would come up with a blessed tool for kind of each thing that we’re working on and have it be our corporate standard and then work through the renewal dates for each of these pieces of software to cancel as much as we can. And we found we were able to save a ton of money and we were actually able to make things a lot better people to have one common standard for project management, one common standard for a bunch of other things, creative and life was just a lot better after we simplified.
Isaac Sacolick:
Thank you, John. Derek, welcome to the floor. Derek, I love this statement. John said, and I’m sure you’ve seen this all the time, you asked the question, what software do you use? And you know that nobody has the comprehensive list of what’s being used, where is it being used, how well is it performing and who’s the owner and manages it? I’m sure you have some good stories around the risks around that particular type of problem. Absolutely. Good
Derrick Butts:
Morning. Yeah, some of the companies I’ve worked with in the past, as John mentioned, you do that audit before the audit. You ask them what applications are you working with, what do you have? And it’s like a deer, the headlights type of reaction you get back. But one of the companies working with, I see this more so in smaller companies, in the larger companies, but one of the nonprofits I was worked with in the past, we did initial audit that came back with 134 applications, and the question was, do you really need all these? And what we found out was this duplication of applications, there were applications they didn’t realize that they had, that they were using, and the problem was the organizations, departments were not talking to each other. So one department may have a software package and the other department didn’t know that, so they bought something similar, not realizing they could have utilized what they’ve already had.
At the end of the day, we found out from that 134 applications from initial assessment, we were able to get it down to actually 84 applications total that were useful productive applications that everybody could get their teeth into. There was one instance, we found 19 different versions of Adobe Acrobat, which was just crazy because now you’re creating this, John mentioned you’re creating a larger attack surface, so all these applications need to be managed, but the problem was, and John hit it on the head, the accounting department was not working with the IT department to make them accountable for what applications were actually coming into the organization. Everybody was kind of doing their own thing and they were running rogue. And until we streamlined it and had those services now vetted through the IT department and then approved by the accounting or the CFO, then people started to realize I can no longer just buy this.
So by saving them 30% of their operational spending budget, we were able to take that money and reinvest into more security technologies. They’ll keep those things from happening again. But again, the question is being asked what are the applications do it and how effective it’s going to be? In a lot of cases, we found the applications they had, they were only using 30% of the overall capability, which means they were wasting the money that they were spending because they’re not optimizing the full value and the full of what they’ve already purchased. So a lot of times it’s asking the questions, but really drilling down into and doing that assessment and then getting the people to talk to each other to help them understand how can we increase productivity not only between the communication between our branches, but also the productivity of the SaaS applications that we’re using across the board.
Isaac Sacolick:
I love this. So we have a productivity story, we have a cost saving story, we have a risk mitigation story. I think compounding this is I run a small business, I’ve seen pricing go up 10 to 20% a year on SaaS and when you’re only using a third of the capabilities, I think there’s a lot of really good question, we’re already jumping into consolidation opportunities. I want to stick on the problem statement, Joe, construction manufacturing, this isn’t an issue, is it?
Joe Puglisi:
Oh, no, no. Well, we could talk for hours about the disconnection between the field and the home office and all the subcontractors, construction managers and the owners and the financiers all using their own systems and mostly spreadsheets in the construction industry. But I wanted to come back to the issue that John started with the proliferation of my favorite application for solving my particular problem, and an issue that we haven’t surfaced yet, which I think is in a tremendous time sink and disruption to every organization, big and small, is a lack of the one truth principle. There’s this concept that something has to be the system of record for a piece of information. And when I have revenue in my spreadsheet and you have revenue in your SaaS application and someone else is using the revenue numbers from the financial platform, we’re going to spend a good portion of our time, our valuable time at the management table discussing who’s got the right number and boy, what a tremendous waste of time and energy that is. So the need to rationalize applications skinny down the list of things being used, everyone thinks that their application is the best suited, but you can’t all be right. So let’s come to a compromise and decide which one is truly the best for everyone to use. And then we have one place where any particular piece of information is the piece of information of record and we take away the debate.
Isaac Sacolick:
I want to bring in another use case here. Christian, if I can bring you back and then we’ll bring Joanne in. Christian, we’re talking a little bit about having too many existing tools overlaps between tools, unused tools, lack of integration between tools, even lack of a list of tools. I mean, the other part of gray work is the gaps between tools, right? The place where a department needs an application and never had one. I’m thinking about shop floor management. I’m thinking about tracking work in progress in construction where that’s typically done through every project manager’s favorite spreadsheet. In my case, I have a whole slew of applications that I’ve built up for StarCIO. Many of them are built on QuickBase. I’ve actually gotten some videos out around this that are unique to how I manage content. People ask me, Isaac, how do you write so much content out there every single month? And a lot of my process that you don’t see it would be hard to do without automation, without tools in place for being able to do it efficiently. So Christian, can you talk about the other side of gray work, which is lost productivity because departments don’t have the apps they actually need to do their work.
Christian Potts:
Yeah, I really appreciate you bringing this up, Isaac, because I think I want to sort of touch back to something Joe started to introduce, which is this idea of there are specific industries where I feel like this becomes less of a, it’s harder to get my job done thing and becomes more of a revenue or in some cases a safety issue. So those gaps that you’re talking about, they could be gaps between who has a single source of truth for getting a project kicked off. So you’re in the bid management process, how can you be sure that you have the right level of access to who’s available for when you’re bidding for work for a construction agency and making sure that you have the right HVAC installer available or that you’ve got the most recent certifications for your steel or your iron folks. But then there’s a whole other piece of this which ties into the safety issue, which is if there are gaps in what your field teams are telling you when they’re out in the field, that’s a real vulnerability that you’re going to have.
There’s one example that I sort of think of over and over again. There’s a large Australian based company that QuickBase works with. If you’ve driven around any sort of suburban area like where I live in New England, you’ve seen one of their trucks around, they do a lot of tree removal, brush removal, they take stuff off power lines, stuff like that after storms. And they actually pointed right at this issue, which was they had teams who were out in highly volatile areas by weather or by climate, even by wildlife, and they were running into situations where their teams were out there and they were trying to report back that, hey, that tree or that group of trees or that boulder or whatever that was in one place yesterday is now in an entirely different position today, and that has a real impact on our ability to get to this location so that we can do the disaster remediation work that it takes to get power lines back up or restore and water service or whatever.
So there’s two things that work there. Number one, it’s a productivity thing. Now your team is sitting there idling outside an area while they wait for another team to show up. We can get that out of the way. Or you’ve got a team that’s in that site already and now they’re looking at a completely different working condition that wasn’t there yesterday and maybe that working condition has an additional hazard that wasn’t captured because there’s no data flowing back and forth between what’s happening in the field and what the home office is seeing and then vice versa. So those are two really big places. I think that can be big points of vulnerability when you have those gaps, when you have those pockets, pockets of doubt or just pockets of no information between what’s happening out in the field, what’s happening on the front lines or what’s happening within your group of subcontractors when it comes to getting worked up.
Isaac Sacolick:
I think that’s a really good area for Joanne to comment on with her experiences around this. Also, Joanne, there’s a great interesting statement here from Dennis on the common stream that you might want to chime in on as well. He says it’s part of the lack of strategy development from the IT function and communicating that strategy to the broader business. In other words, saying things like, IT isn’t telling me that they have the tool, so I’m just going to go out and buy it myself. So we have this gap of information flow or gap of accurate real-time information flow from field to back office that Christian’s talking about and this communication lack of strategy from IT about how to use broad platforms to solve lots of different problems. Joanne, welcome to the floor.
Joanne Friedman:
Good morning and thank you. I think I want to address the strategy issue first because there’s a real dichotomy between context and situational awareness that affects both of these issues. One is IT strategy is to deliver to a specific set of requirements broadly, but where, and Joe May have a comment on this as well, where it drops the ball as an organization is making the business aware that just because the tool is designed to do X and Y does not mean it’s not also designed to do Zed. There’s this lack of awareness comes from a lack of contextuality and lack of situational awareness. People who are in the field who may be seeing a situation in real time, that contextual awareness, that situational awareness that’s not being fed back into a system of record. That’s where it needs to step up and the business also needs to step up to close that gap because, and this is where the semantic layer in some cases or contextualization from an LLM or an agentic AI agent, a true agentic agent that’s sensing and discovering and feeding back and learning into the system, that’s where those tools need to be brought to the forefront to say, Hey, by the way, if you’re designing and your strategy is to accomplish a particular goal with a system, don’t be constrained by a narrow perspective.
Apply a broader perspective to it as part of the IT strategy and communicate that to the business that just because you have this tool that you think is only designed to do a, B and whatever, it can also do a lot of other things. You have to apply a certain amount of what we would call critical thinking to it or contextual awareness. Don’t be afraid to change your hat for a different task, but use the same tool because the insights that you’re going to gain from it form a very valuable perspective that can be routed back to business units, but also back to it to say next time you’re doing a modification or we’re doing an upgrade or we’re choosing a tool, we’re not necessarily trying to enlarge the technology estate, we’re trying to pare it down for cost savings, but we’re going to be more creative in how we do those requirements to make sure that we don’t have hidden overlaps, which drag productivity down because you’re navigating through a bunch of stuff you don’t really need, but we’re becoming very purposeful about our new investments and how we’re pairing down the estate and recovering from sun cost and technical debt.
Isaac Sacolick:
Yeah, Joanne echoes of messages from Martin Davis who isn’t here today and Joe about it. Leaders getting out into the field and really seeing how things are operating. Then number two, bringing those stories back to their staff and giving them the time to learn what technologies are out there and what capabilities are out there, and more importantly to share what exists in the enterprise a little bit. So there’s a bit of reuse, and for me, the reuse comes from having platforms, right? Platforms that are extendable. I’m not picking a solution just for solving one particular step in a process just because they’ve got some really good user experience there around it and saying, look, I’m going to look at the whole end-to-end stakeholders. I’m going to look at all the end users. I’m going to look at field, I’m going to look at back office. I’m look at the data story and then to your point, Joanne, look at where agents are going to be capable of doing some of that work and partnering with on some of that work going into the future.
Joanne Friedman:
Isaac, if I may, I have a little anecdote to tell you, which is we took our lead architect and developer out into a factory and to give them the experience of this is what really happens on a manufacturing floor that neither of them had ever really been exposed to, and we let them walk around and talk to people and get a feel for you are designing for these users, you are designing for a company of this size or that size. These are the kinds of processes, this is what people go through every day. And the feedback was tremendous, not only from our folks, but from the people on the shop floor and the plant manager and the CFO who was there and the CIO who was there who never had put the connect the dots together in such a way to give that experience to the people who are actually writing the code.
And their perceptions and their perspective radically changed in a couple of hours. So we don’t live in a vacuum. We now live in the real world and we’re reflecting and taking in the tribal knowledge, if you will, lack of a better word, I apologize, or the institutional knowledge of that workforce and looking at how that colors their direction for design, for coding, for deployment, even. Oh, we have to change these things. And this is I think one of the things that has long been a drag on product releases. Nobody ever goes directly with a programmer in hand or with a code developer or a lead architect and says, see what this person is doing, see how they actually work over a period of a few hours. And it was a very enlightening experience for us. We had a good take on it, but those on the floor and the two individuals radically different perspective after the fact.
Joe Puglisi:
Joanne, I did the same exact thing with our EDI lead architect. He’d been with the firm seven years and it is never once climbed one flight of stairs to the manufacturing plant to see how the actual process works that he had been coding for seven years.
Isaac Sacolick:
Yeah, that’s crazy. That’s crazy. Let’s bring Liz in and then I’ll take my break after that. Thank you for these stories, Joanne, John and Joe. Hi Liz.
Liz Martinez:
Hey, how you doing? I love when we’re talking about linking this problem to the strategy. So part of the building a value realization office as I’ve been pumping out regularly recently, is understanding what the value is that you’re trying to bring to the business, to the strategy, to your end users, to your customer base, to your internal users. And as long as we’re maintaining that lens of looking at where we need to be adding value, this drag on productivity becomes a very clear problem that people will get on board with. Everybody likes to have their own car, but when we start thinking about global warming, maybe that’s not such a great idea. Maybe you don’t need six cars because one car will do, and a lot of people don’t think about software as buying another car or buying a bicycle or buying a motorcycle, but we do call our software assets.
They are assets, right? When you’re buying furniture, you don’t think, well, I don’t need 18 couches. Maybe I should find out how many chairs for an additional people I need in the existing living room that is already set. So thinking about that in terms of value to the organization and thinking about it in terms of value to your customers internally and externally, and ultimately your stock price is really where you start going with this, and that’s how you get the architect to get off his chair and go take a look at the manufacturing floor. That’s how you do it.
Isaac Sacolick:
Thank you, Liz. We’re going to take our quick break here folks. Thank you for joining this week’s Coffee with Digital Trailblazers. Thank you for sometimes
Isaac Sacolick:
Thank you for joining this week’s copy with Digital Trailblazers. Thank you for coming back. After last week’s break, we are in our interesting and thoughtful conversation around the silent drag on productivity navigating digital sprawl. I want to thank our sponsors today. Our sponsor is QuickBase. QuickBase is the AI powered operation platform used by more than 12,000 organizations worldwide to transform ordinary work into extraordinary impact, combined powerful AI capabilities and flexibility and ease of low-code, no-code technology. QuickBase boost productivity improves efficiency and enhances employee safety for organizations managing large scale projects and operations in industries like construction and manufacturing. Founded in 1999, QuickBase headquartered in Boston with teams in London and Bangalore. For more information, please visit http://www.quickbase.com. And for those of you interested, I’ve wet you a couple of my articles. I’ve written that around technology and I am also a quick base customer, so if you ever have a question about how to improve your gray work and address it, you can go through me, reach out, and I will show you demos of how I run my back office operation and eliminate my gray work.
Christian, I want to bring you back in. We’ve been talking about sort of the organizational impact, a little bit about having too many applications and what this looks like of having hundreds to two hundreds of applications. Let’s look at it from the employee perspective and what’s the impact on their workflow, how are they feeling about it? I think we need to get into that because a lot of the times when we’re either trying to get adoption on a new technology or we’re talking about consolidation or even if we’re empowering more citizen developed technologies, we have to look at it from the end user perspective first. What are you telling your end users about either the opportunity to use a platform to create a technology, use a platform to leverage a technology built on that platform and to consolidate technology, consolidate onto a platform to improve their productivity, happiness, and workflow? Welcome back, Christian.
Christian Potts:
Thanks. I really appreciate this question. I think it really does have a tie back to a lot of what’s been talked about definitely in the chat, but also in the conversation here about this idea of too many apps, too many solutions, too many things that only to use Joanne’s language that do a great job of A, B, and C, but maybe don’t do Z and that Zed might be the thing you really needed to do. And so now you’re just piling solution on top of solution. On top of solution. We’ve actually gone in and we’ve looked at this pretty closely, not only to the gray work research, but we also did survey in IT, consolidation. I want to put the IT consolidation research aside. That was mainly from the IT lead perspective, but from the ground floor, that everyday employee standpoint, there’s this real gap that’s developing between how much companies are investing in technology for productivity and how much that is actually making it harder to be productive.
The numbers are pretty stark when you look at it. So 80% of the companies that we’ve surveyed say that they are increasing their investment in productivity, work management, collaboration tools, but meanwhile, 59% of the employees are actually the ones who have to use those tools, say that those tools are making it harder for them to get their work done. And one of the big ones that jumps out, and this is something John, you and I were talking, but before we started the session here, our project management tools, I’m talking about your run of the mill Smartsheets, your Mondays or Asana. These are tools that were sort of heralded as being the unlocks for large teams to do these big projects. And what’s happening is that people are starting to bring these tools in and maybe because there are low license fees or no license fees, they’ve got a freeware version, they’re doing all, they’re sort of bringing these things on their own.
And what’s happening is now they have multiple project management solutions. Some of them have as many as six or seven they’re using daily just to find a piece of information to move a project forward. And that number, that high degree of number of project management tools they’re using, these are making it harder for them to do basic things like share information with teammates. You’re running a project, you’ve got to use the construction example. You’ve got a team of subs who are showing up on a day and maybe one of them is your HVAC sub. Maybe one of them is your concrete sub. Maybe one of them is there’s someone who’s dropping off a loader or dropping off a big piece of equipment. And each one of these is trying to figure out, okay, so they get the work order and now they’re trying to figure out, okay, do I need to drop off a hundred sets of PVC or do I need to drop off a thousand sets of PC?
But they can’t get that information because the work order lives in one platform and the supply base lives in another platform, or maybe it’s sitting on someone’s desk in a printout, and meanwhile, all of that information that they need to just answer that simple question is just not available to them. And that’s even harder because now if it’s not available to you, it means you can’t see it. If you can’t see it, how are you expected to act on it and how are you expected to act on, act on it? To get back to the point that Joseph made in the last portion of the conversation where there’s revenue in, how can you make a decision that’s going to move a project forward that helps you realize revenue and doesn’t instead lead to greater cost or things falling behind on a timeline because you can’t see it. I mean, these are the kinds of things that I think when you think about the employee effects, these are real effects that make people just feel really bad about going to work every day.
Isaac Sacolick:
Christian, let’s go. You mentioned safety earlier. Maybe go a little bit deeper into that because obviously if you’re in construction and manufacturing as an employee, that’s top concern for yourself. It’s certainly top concern for management, so there’s alignment there. What are some of the things companies are doing to sort of bridge the gap and say, you know what, this is how we put the right tools in people’s hands so that it has an impact on safety we lose Christian.
Christian Potts:
Yep. So I’ll give you a really quick example. So we work with Consigli Construction, they’re longtime customer of ours. We’ve done a lot of different work with ’em and I want to actually bring AI back into the conversation here because there’s a great story that they tell, and I think Isaac, you probably have heard this story firsthand from Anthony
Where he talks about that they had, they’re like every other construction company, they’ve get a number of different moving parts that are made up of people and equipment and they’re on job sites, they’re managing this large portfolio, and safety is a non-negotiable as it should be. It’s the number one thing that they’re concerned about. It’s the number one thing that gets them out of bed every day and make sure that they want their employees going to work and coming home the same condition every single day. So they saw that they were having not necessarily a safety problem, but just having a safety disconnect where there was information that they had on individual jobs that could help them plan out the next job or to plan a similar job in a different environment using the same kinds of subs and the same kind of workforce, same kind of equipment.
And there was a safety aspect to that that they were continually sort of having to redo over and over again. And so they started applying AI and LLMs to figure out, okay, what are the common factors that are showing up in these kinds of projects and these kinds of environments that these time of year and these geographies, and started to understand that that could be a way that they could advance their safety posture in a way that promoted that culture. And that does two things. Number one, I think obviously the most important thing, it keeps everybody safe, it keeps the workplace safe, it makes sure that you don’t have slip hazards or faulty equipment, whatever, but I think it also empowers employees to really take ownership of something like that. All of a sudden you’re saying to employees not only if you see something, say something, but if you see something, say something, it’s going to be now something that’s going to help someone else in a very profound way because we can apply a technology like AI to look for those common issues and to now start to put those common issues into the way that you are scoping projects or the way that you’re looking at job sites or the way that you’re looking at things that happen by the time of year or whatever.
One last little bit here, I heard a great story from one of our construction leaders here, guy by the name of Bob who’s former technology developer with electric, excuse me, with Lighthouse Electric, and he now works for us and he told this story to me because I thought was really indicative of that. So he was working on a job site with Lighthouse Electric where they had a job that was happening in somewhere in the, I can’t remember if it’s Arizona or Nevada, and they were doing a job where they were laying some PVC pipe, some conduit pipe that was going to be used to lay fiber to basically connect a couple of different locations and obviously the pipe, the trench has to be dug a certain depth and it has to be the pipe has to fit in and it has to be connected and this many feet and this much whatever.
There was one factor that I think was a big part of this safety story, and it was the fact that at the time of year the project was being done, temperatures down that close to the ground where the trench was being built and where the technician was going to have to go down and actually install the pipe, were going to be upwards of 120 to 140 degrees on the ground. And the person who was coming to do this was a big guy. He’s like picture in your head a sort of classic idea of what a construction person would look like. This was that kind of guy. And because they had the understanding gleaned through doing work in that area time and time again, that at this time of year in these conditions at this location, the temperature was going to be this high. They built a specialized cooling vest just for him.
So when he showed up on the day he wasn’t going to have some kind of heat stroke or some sort of catastrophic health event like that, and this was because they were able to use the data they had got, they had gathered from previous jobs at that site to put in place a protective element for this individual to do his job on that day that made sure that he was safe, that the project stayed on track and that they didn’t lose any money or any time because they had to wait for a cooler day or a different technician to show up. That to me is like a microcosm of exactly what you’re talking about. Safety is about the right data and the right place at the right time to make a decision that keeps people safe, keeps jobs moving forward and promotes the right kind of culture you want to have in your organization.
Isaac Sacolick:
Thank you, Christian. That’s just an amazing couple of stories there. Let’s bring Derek and then Joanne back in. Hi Derek. Hi. So Christian,
Derrick Butts:
The points you bring up are valid, especially when you’re talking about safety. I look at it more from a risk point of view. So the problem I see in looking at these organizations with all these different applications and trying to figure out who’s going to manage what is, again, we talk about the communication issues, they don’t talk to each other. I’m dealing with the customers even the past and even now where they’re dealing with several project management platforms and they’re not talking to each other. So when one part of the division has a risk in the other, I ask them, are you aware of the risk in project B? And the answer is no. So because of that, they don’t understand the ripple effect of the risk in one part of the organization coming to the other. So it’s going to impact everything moving forward when it comes to risk overall and how we can stay productive on that project or even maintain that particular schedule. So when you look at this across the board, I mean the communication is huge, it’s lacking, but it also goes back to the lack of leadership strategically working and foking through this, through either the IT department, the CISO or other departments that would work with this because they’re missing it. Everybody’s kind of doing their own thing because they’ve got all these applications or application overload and they can’t focus on the productivity or the safety or the risk at hand because they’re missing it altogether.
Isaac Sacolick:
Derek, there’s something subtle in what you just shared here that I’m going to share. I put it in a whiteboard, but the fact that when the organization finds it permissible to have hundreds of tools out there with every group or every department or workflow using their own tool for their own information, it also creates an amplification around communications that tools collect data, they create collaborations, they enable sharing of information. When you have all these tools that aren’t talking to each other, I think it makes it easier for people not to talk to each other. And when you centralize this information, when you have common experiences, when data has a central point of truth, as Joe called it out earlier, you end up with that transparent organization that most leaders are looking for. Go ahead, Derek.
Derrick Butts:
No. So when there’s lack of interoperability and communication and visibility between application, it definitely translates to lack of visibility and communication between those people who put those systems in place. Thank you, Derek. Hi,
Isaac Sacolick:
Joanne.
Joanne Friedman:
Hi. I would add perhaps a slightly different perspective. It’s not about the applications not communicating with each other. It’s more about the fact that until recently with AI, you were not capturing institutional knowledge and that the data that is storing it, for example, what is used to contextualize or create a semantic layer in technology terms is really part of the communication that goes between humans. And so human in the loop becomes even more important in this environment because to Christian’s story, the individual in question might be a very large human who needs a cooling vest, but in context, it might have been exacerbated by the fact that perhaps that person is diabetic, in which case they get hotter, faster or has another medical condition. My point is that all the various piece parts of data have value when they’re put together as a whole and aimed at a particular outcome or a problem.
Safety increases. What about when we’re in factories with robots? We have certain areas that we’re not supposed to traverse because that’s where the robot goes, but we can make the robot stop for a human. Well, what about the human stopping for the robot that goes to productivity and to yield and to cost and things like that, but it also actually makes us aware of our own surroundings which make us safer as employees. So we have to look at both sides of the equation, and it’s not so much a single source of truth, but how we go about contextualizing all the information when you go to an LLM, you’re asking a generic question. It uses time, it uses tokens, and it may not give you the answer that you expect simply because it’s pointing, its learning in a different direction than the way you’re asking the question.
So the perspective also has to be applied, and I think we’re at an inflection point with AI where these items are starting to spin out why we need specialized language models, why we need AgTech, why a foundation or a fundamental model. Frontier model isn’t always going to give us the best that we can get. We have to be more educated around how that communication with AI needs to work. Not in prompting, but it could be simple, it could be mathematical, and what kind of AI is really going to fill in that blank for us? I think as we’re looking at the sprawl of applications, some of those factors also come into risk mitigation, to costing, to stemming the sprawl and recuperating some cost in applications that we have we use, but we’re not using as much as we could have.
Isaac Sacolick:
Thank you. Joanne. I want to go to my third question at this point. We’re down to our last 12 minutes. I want to get into solutions because we’ve talked about the problem drags on productivity, impact on safety, inability to track contest. We have a context, we’re losing our knowledge, which is critically important in the industrial space. I want John to jump in here first. John, you’ve done the exercise of consolidation. I want to hear your perspective of where do you find the place to start? What’s the low hanging fruit and how do you find the big rocks, the big opportunities that are going to either improve productivity or improve cost or reduce risks? Where do you start with this problem? I’m hoping somebody will also chime in on the human factor, one of my guests, the folks who want to hold onto their tools. What do you say to those folks? And maybe even what do you say to the CFO where there’s probably an upfront investment to do the consolidation, but there’s probably a value at the end of the rainbow around this? Someone said 30% cost savings. So let’s look at this from several perspectives. John, let’s talk for you first. Where are you finding the first layer of opportunity when there’s a lot of tools out there?
John Patrick Luethe:
A lot of times what we want to do is try to look to see where we’re spending money and then what data is in places. And so the two areas that I’ve had really success looking in the past is one is SaaS applications, and then the other one is the cloud spend. And so what I’ve typically found is that we do one exercise to go through and understanding how much we’re spending on each of the SaaS applications that we’d have. And so we’d make that Excel spreadsheet, we’d understand how much is it a month or a year, how many users, what data’s in there and what are we using it for? And then that’s one. And then the other area I’ve actually had the bigger cost savings is finding out the digital sprawl in cloud spend. And so we would go to start pulling a report of basically how are people spending money in the cloud and based off the tags it has, and what we often find is a lot of people actually haven’t tagged their information.
And so then we have a report of these are our accounts with this much spend that’s not tagged, and that’s how we started. It’s just trying to identify where are we spending money and how much money are we spending? And from there we start looking at what do we want to go after is usually we want to go after what’s the most expensive one demo list sorted by value of money, and then on the cloud side, what’s the biggest spend that’s not tagged and who owns it or who do we think that owns it or what department owns it and what is it doing and it should it be there.
Isaac Sacolick:
So you’re looking for the biggest spend that’s underutilized is what you’re saying?
John Patrick Luethe:
Yeah, and we actually go the other way. We don’t just ask should it be there, flip it around, flip the script and try to saying, make the people justify spending the money for this thing. Are you really getting business value added? This $10,000 you spend here, it’s like, what does it add? Are you not able to use one of the other problems, the other pieces of software? We have to solve your problem and if we make people validate that if we give you some money, we find that more effective than just saying like, Hey, do you need this?
Isaac Sacolick:
Got it. John, let’s bring Joe in. Joe, which of my questions do you want to grab at?
Joe Puglisi:
Well, I’m going to talk about low hanging fruit, and I’ll give you a very concrete example as the CIO of a mid-size company. When I arrived, I mapped out all of the business processes that were in play and lo and behold discovered that they had not one, not two, but three BI platforms. And so one of the early low hanging fruit money savers and time savers was simply to mediate the discussion among the users of these three different tools to find out which one everyone could agree, could do 99% of the work or a third of the total cost. There’s so much of that in corporate America. I can’t imagine that there are savings out there in both time and money just in rationalizing tools. The other thing is in the chat, in the comments, in the live comments someone pointed out about it, strategy and communication, which is my favorite bail whip. People have to know what tools are available and the IT staff ought to know what people are trying to do and then map the tools we have into the processes that people are undertaking and let’s make sure we use the tools we have and that we don’t proliferate. As someone said, it is not telling me what tools we have, so I’ll just go out and buy my own. Well, you need to get in front of that and communication is key education.
Isaac Sacolick:
So Joe, let’s say we’re in that scenario. We’re now looking for consolidation. We find a low hanging fruit, whether it’s by unused or cost or a situation where there’s equivalents and now you’re bringing those folks in and saying, you know what? We think we can use an existing platform or we’re going to choose a platform here that allows us to do an end-to-end process in this area. How do you sell the stakeholders on that?
Joe Puglisi:
It is the usual characteristic stick, right? So the carrot is, Hey, look, I can train you on how to use this tool to do what you’re doing now, easier, faster, better, and you got to make code in the promise else you can say, look, we can’t have both tools. This one can be made to do what you’re doing. We’ll help you to get there, but the other tools going away. I used the latter by the way, so I’m speaking from experience. In one case, there was just no sense in having a second tool despite the fact that people said, oh, it was critical and it was really necessary and we really needed it. We didn’t and we proved it in the end.
Isaac Sacolick:
Interesting. Christian, what do you see on your end in terms of how organizations look to do consolidation or look to invest in addressing the great work?
Christian Potts:
There’s a big human component that happens here. We’ve now heard this I think three different times and three different questions about are you paying attention to, are you listening to or are you factoring in things like the way in which people want to work, decisions that people make that the example that Joanne gave that was really interesting was we teach the robots how to get around the shop floor or how to get around the job site and navigating around the people, but do we teach the people sort of how to work amongst those things? It’s very much kind of the same case with I think software. Do we actually, when you think about the software decisions that you made and the buying decisions that you made, has the strategic usefulness of that tool really ever sort of been considered? The example I sort of flashback to time and time again was years ago I started working at a market data research firm, and I was in the similar positions to 1:00 AM now and we were getting ready to launch a new brand.
And so I asked, okay, well, where does all our creative live? And it was part of it lived in one tool, and so the video part lived in one tool and the other part lived on a SharePoint and the other part lived in a Canva and all these different places. And I remember saying to my time, the CMO asking her just point blank, why isn’t in all these different places? And she said, well, it just seemed like that was the easiest place to put it. And I said, well, is it truly the easiest place or have we actually thought about the workflow that goes into this when someone like me who has to use all of these tools but isn’t necessarily the creator of any of them has to access them and then use those to put together some kind of cohesive brand story or some kind of cohesive campaign that goes into this.
I can’t be cycling through seven different tabs to find a logo here and a boilerplate there and an image there and whatever, just so I can get something into a place where I can start to drive leads off of it. That’s the kind of strategic decision making I think you have to have is what is the actual aim of what we’re trying to do here? And once you’ve got agreement amongst the business and agreement amongst not only from the ground level employees have to use the tool, but more importantly the people who have to make decision about buying the tool, then you can start to have that give and take process that goes along with that and decide, is this tool really, is it robust enough? Does it have enough of the features? Are we using it enough? Is it costing too much by a license? That’s when those decisions can happen. But first we have to have that elevated conversation where you say to yourself, is this getting us to the point where we want to go? Is this driving home the goal and the overall impact we’re trying to make?
Isaac Sacolick:
Interesting. Christian, thank you for joining us this week and thank you for having quickly sponsor our episode. We’ve got a couple minutes left. Joanne, a quick word before we close out,
Joanne Friedman:
Quick word to Christian’s point, what value does this application software or the data that it uses bring to the organization to move us to move the needle either to revenue, growth, resilience, all of those top line values, innovation or bottom line cost savings? And really that’s how we measure for consolidation because it’s not about the tool, it’s about the value that the tool brings from the data and from the individuals using the tool to the organization to move it forward. So it’s a value metric and return on data is one way to do it. Rhoda is another way to do it. You can use a Monte Carlo calculation, but companies need to start doing that more today than they ever have in the past, and I think that’s a big gap in their knowledge, how technology can be used to drive strategic direction.
Isaac Sacolick:
Thank you, Joanne. Thank you, Christian. I’m going to leave you one insight I find one of the best ways to do this is to get people, specific people in the organization excited about end-to-end workflow, end-to-end opportunity around data end-to-end value, and empowering them to be a part of the process for creating those capabilities in common platforms. That’s always been what’s excited me about using the QuickBase platform is I can find people who can actually solution across the organization in standardized ways, in ways that are connecting with data, in ways that are creating common user experiences. So thrilled to have QuickBase as a sponsor today. Quickb Base’s AI powered operation platform gives complex industries the data connectivity and visibility they need to keep large scale projects on time, in budget, and promote a culture of safety and compliance. For more information, please visit http://www.quickbase.com. Thank you again, Christian, for joining us and for sponsoring today’s episode.
Thank you for all my speakers, Elizabeth, Joanne, John, who else do we have here? Joe. Heather was here earlier. Derek, thank you for joining us. Next week’s coffee hour on the 13th. On the 6th of June will be AI era. Transformation is ai. The end of it as we know it. The 13th last year, we did an episode celebrating moms. This week, the year we’re going to do an episode on celebrating dads in tech, improved work-life balance for everyone. That will be on the 13th and on the 20th we’ll be talking about another user group preparing grads for the AI errors, opportunities, and disruptions. So I hope you’ll join all three of those episodes. I’ll announced the 27th in a couple weeks. Please join my newsletter for all my announcements. That’s at digital Starcio.com/driving. I think that gets you to the newsletter. Geez, I forgot my own URLs. Thank you for joining this week. Again, thank you for quick grace for sponsoring everybody. Have a nice weekend. We’ll see you here again soon.
You are unauthorized to view this page.
You are unauthorized to view this page.
