Inside the mind of the CTO
Welcome to the Upstack podcast, an ever evolving conversation on all things digital infrastructure, giving tech leaders food for thought as they push to stay ahead of the technology curve. I'm Alex Cole. And with my co host and colleague, Greg Moss, we invite you to join us as we talk candidly about the latest technology infrastructure topics. Stay with us. Welcome back to another episode of the Upstack podcast.
Alex Cole:Craig Moss, how are you, sir?
Greg Moss:I just started smiling the minute you started talking. You know? I'm excited too. It's one of my favorite places to be, Alex. You know that.
Alex Cole:You know, we've got an important conversation to get to today because, you know, usually if you look at past episodes or I guess listen to past episodes, typically, we're viewing our field or industry from a more granular level, micro, if you will, talking to different experts and our now dear friends, across a range of topics, of course, data center, cloud, security, procurement, AI, you name it, it runs the gamut. But I think it's about time we took a 30,000 foot view and got a little macro. What do you think?
Greg Moss:It's a great idea. Perfect direction. Excited to dive
Alex Cole:in. Awesome. Well, let's let's take that broader view, and let's let's train our lens since we're both wearing glasses. On the seat at the head of the technology organization, the CTO, this is actually an idea we tossed around for quite a bit. We are fortunate to have the perfect guest, but more on our guest momentarily.
Alex Cole:Frankly, as we know all too well, Greg, and we talk about in every episode of the DevStack podcast, this landscape, this technology landscape we're operating in is shifting, and, frankly, it's always changing. But I'm curious if the role of the CTO has changed. And if so, how? I know you're curious too. So we ask our listeners, let's join us as we take a deep dive in the evolution of what is very much a business critical role and it with its constant wave of challenges and, of course, opportunities, risks, rewards, doubts, expectations.
Alex Cole:I could go on with the parallelism, but I will not. We have to I think we're obligated to quote our friends over at Gartner. They had a recent survey. It was, it was actually cited in a cio.com article where the survey issued earlier this year found that CTOs face innumerable challenges in their efforts to digitally transform their organizations, including culture, demonstrating the value of innovation, and, of course, budget or or funding. Survey also found that CTOs with more than 6 years tenure in their position are less likely to cite internal politics as an inhibitor to progress compared to those who have less years under their belt.
Alex Cole:Turns out tenure has its benefits.
Greg Moss:We have enough politics in 2024, Alex. You know?
Alex Cole:You know? Hey. It'll be the fall fall before we know it. But for now, as you prepare for our next journey, Greg, feel like those are some important bread crumbs or tidbits we could take with us. But luckily for us, we have the perfect guest, a seasoned veteran in the position who can give context to the data and provide some real world examples and insights into the process.
Alex Cole:Please welcome to the show, Linda Lannon. Linda, welcome.
Linda Lannen:Thank you. I appreciate it. Happy to be here.
Alex Cole:Thank you for standing by as we bandored a bit. Linda, you are the the chief technology officer for the global environmental consulting firm SWCA Environmental. And if I may go on, you have more than 20 years of experience in architectural engineering and the construction industry, taking on huge projects, including but not limited to wide area network migration and installing enterprise security programs. Our our deep dive on your background show that your experience spans not only industries such as telecommunications and food manufacturing, but you've got a lot of experience with our friends in the Fortune 500. So, Linda, welcome to the show.
Alex Cole:We're glad you're here. Hopefully, you were forewarned because this is our inside the mind of the CTO. So, you're a good sport, and hopefully, you enjoy this experience. But we are are thrilled to talk to you and, again, appreciate you making some some time. You know, we have our pre show call and we have a great time doing it.
Alex Cole:And you, you use the term when I was just asking a bit about your experience and your background. I think you referred to yourself as the accidental CTO. And very curious, what is it about your about your background? If you could walk us through that that led you to this position at the head of the technology organization.
Linda Lannen:You know, I I kind of call it an accidental CTO because I I didn't start out when I was 23 or whatever and say I'm gonna be a CTO or I'm gonna lead the technology organization for any kind of company. Actually, I had a degree in finance and actuarial science and, realized I didn't love doing the actuarial science piece of that. And so stepped back and and took another shot at what my career might look like. And I happened upon a role that for a few tries as a a technical writer for a small marketing organization that worked primarily for technology clients, the largest of which was IBM. And, so I got this job basically writing articles about how IBM reference customers used technology.
Linda Lannen:It could have been, you know, an AS 400 or it could have been OS 2 at the time or it could have been, you know, Lotus Notes or any of the other kind of things that that IBM was selling at the time. The opportunity came about, because the, quote, unquote, IT guy at that organization quit kinda suddenly and leaving a vacancy that nobody knew how to fill. And so I raised my hand. I think that's kind of a theme throughout my career. I raised my hand and said, hey.
Linda Lannen:If you guys help me learn or send me to a class, I will figure this out. And fortunately for me, they agree. And, that was the start to my technology group.
Alex Cole:So a natural curiosity led you down the path to the the role of CTO. I'm curious. Does anyone start out their career wanting to be a CTO? Is that a an ambition, I wonder?
Linda Lannen:I think that I have run into those folks. I remember, though, I was, I'm not wired this way, but I remember having a conversation with somebody early in my career where they had said, like, when they graduated from college that they wanted to be, you know, chief actuary at a company. And I thought, oh, I'm not even sure I knew what an actuary was then. So, but, you know and so they kind of made out a project plan for, like, what their career looked like, and and god bless them, because I they they made that role probably by the time they were 45. So I think that there are folks who set out and say I I run a they may not say I wanna be a CTO, but they might say, I wanna, you know, run the technology piece or be a CBO in a technology organization.
Linda Lannen:I will say, I don't think that there is a standard definition for CIO, CTO. Now we see titles like chief digital transformation officer, chief digital information officer, and things like that out there. I sort of look at all of those roles pretty interchangeably because there's not a standard, and it really you know, sometimes you see a CTO report to a CIO. Sometimes you see a CIO report to a CTO. It's there's not really a a standard across industries that I've been able to understand about titles.
Linda Lannen:So I use all of those kind of interchangeably.
Greg Moss:Yeah. I I've noticed that a lot of the larger companies tend to have both titles. Right? A lot of the smaller companies tend to have more of a CTO level role. What what are just curious before we kinda dive in here, what are the key differentiators between the 2?
Greg Moss:Like, what are those standout, roles of a CIO, CTO?
Linda Lannen:I think a CIO tends to be pretty internally focused, and I talked about, like, the stakeholders being employees or employee facing technology. I think a CTO may or may not have the CIO in their realm, but also in in internal technology. But it often includes client or or, client or customer facing technology needs there. And then when you look at something like digital transformation and that those kinds of terms, I think that they're a little bit more, baggy, I will say. That that that's where I get into, you know, does that person actually have responsibilities for keeping things alive, and kind of that utility model of IT, or is it really the person who's focused completely on change, in which we kind of be what their titles imply.
Linda Lannen:But when I've seen it, I've also seen that, yes, they're also responsibility responsible for, for both employee facing technology as well as client customer facing technology.
Alex Cole:Linda, how what are your responsibilities today at a at a high level? How do those compare? As we think about the the evolution of the role and there's an evolution, there must be evolution in the role as there are in so many different roles in business today. I'm curious how responsibilities today, some of which it sounds like you just touched on compared to, say, even 5, 10 years ago.
Linda Lannen:Yeah. You know, I think if I go back maybe longer, probably by 10 year or maybe more years ago. Right? And I I said it's kind of tongue in cheek, but the c the CIO or the CTO was kind of the IT guy. Right?
Linda Lannen:And maybe it was the IT guy who'd been around forever the longest, and they were still very technical. And, and I think now, you need to be a real a business leader first who understands technology and is more of a translator or at least whisper maybe. I see I see her and I've used the term kind of geek whisper. Right? It's it's really about understanding it, but being a business leader first who can have those conversations with somebody in marketing about what they need or somebody in human resources and, you know, the chief people officer or the chief financial officer and really understand what it is they're looking for and trying to help them solve a business problem with either data or technology.
Linda Lannen:And I think it's important for us to talk about data as well because we kind of pass that by sometimes. I think that today, you see, for example, in my role, I'm responsible for that the piece of kind of what I call the utility function, right, which is when people just have the expectation that things run. You wanna keep things up and running. It just needs to work. It's reliable.
Linda Lannen:It's predictable. And it's that kind of it's like I said, it's best utility model. Flip the switch. It just should work. Now, though, in addition to that, I'll say the second piece of that would be we wanna make sure there's no security breaches.
Linda Lannen:And often, not always, the CTO includes, you know, responsibility for information security in my role as today. And so those are kind of the 2 pieces, right, that require you to be very solid and stable and maybe not change much. Then you throw things into it, which might be more client to project facing on things like, you know, leveraging data, and you say that goes more into the innovation side of things where things need to change. We need to break things. We need to experiment.
Linda Lannen:We need to try things out. And with innovation comes the need to have more tolerance and brace for failure in that whole product development space. And that can sometimes be hard for people to wrap their heads around both areas, both areas being quite frankly equally important.
Greg Moss:Would you say that I mean, obviously, technology in the last 2 decades have has sped up exponentially. It's actually getting even busier right now. You throw AI into the mix and other things. How how much has innovation how much has in the role of innovation for a CTO or CIO changed from a just a pure percentage? Right?
Greg Moss:Maybe you spent 10% of your time a decade ago. Are you spending 20% of your time now focused on innovation because of this?
Linda Lannen:Oh, well, I think it's it's more than that. I think a decade ago, it was probably, you know, 5 or 10%, and now it's probably somewhere between 30, 50%. Wow. Yeah. Yeah.
Linda Lannen:And that's where I think, you know, you have to look and not just get your you got, you know, kind of one side on the IT side with that reliability, but you gotta you gotta really take those risks on the product side and on the client side. Otherwise, you'll kinda be left behind, and your clients won't see you as as being an innovative partner and coming up with solutions that help them run their businesses. And in some ways, I don't think it's necessarily different in terms of overall business leadership, because I think that other parts of the business have had to do that. My I I reflect there's a CEO, I used to work for named Bob Euler, who was the the retired gentleman emeritus of MWH Global. And I remember our when I was in MWH a long time ago that we always had this piece about balancing growth, profit, and risk.
Linda Lannen:And those when we set out the company strategy, it was kind of 1 third, 1 third, 1 third. Right? Those were equally important. And so I reflect on that because I don't know that that's changed. I think we still you know, there might be some roles that are one or the other, you know, more focused.
Linda Lannen:For example, somebody who's focused on business development, client services. They're probably focused a lot more on growth. Somebody's focused on m and a or other kinds of, you know, making acquisitive of organic growth. They're they're clearly gonna have an end piece there on the growth side. Somebody who is a, you know, VP of risk or CFO is gonna make and CFOs of legal are gonna have more of a risk tangent.
Linda Lannen:But I think that or risk focus, I should say. But I think when we look at overall, and this, I think, is true for technology, whatever your title is, we have to always be looking at all 3 of those pretty evenly.
Alex Cole:So there's there's a there's an equation in there somewhere. This seems like there's a balance that needs to be struck. You touched on reliability, stability, and security maybe a decade or 2 ago. Greg, as you you, you touched on the rapidly the rapid evolution of technology and the innovation that happens with it, here comes the introduction of innovation. And it sounds like technology potentially becoming a value driver for a business and that being part of the CTO's role to be the evangelist for technology and help the business not only run more efficiently, but, stay ahead of the competition and provide maximum value to to the customer or the client in the process.
Alex Cole:If we go back to that idea of the balance, Linda, it seems like, the CTO's dilemma, if you will, is balancing security and now innovation. What do you do to strike that right balance? I understand it might not be 5050, as you just touched on some percentages there.
Linda Lannen:You know, that's a good question. I think that at any given pardon me. In any given organization, there's always a bit of in any given point in time, right, there's gonna be a bigger focus or a lesser focus on certain things. And so I think trying to find the balance is really about having open conversations, not only with your boss and and, hopefully, your boss is the CEO, but having those open conversations with other business leaders, whether it's the COO or the chief marketing officer, the the chief people officer, to really understand, you know, where are where where where are they thinking about and maybe reminding them about, you know, how we need to kinda balance these things. And then when we do look at those 2 things, which are the information security and innovation, and how we we need to pay attention to both of them simultaneously.
Linda Lannen:You know, the CFO might always this is probably gonna always be looking more at information security than at innovation. But somebody who might be in marketing or chief product officer might be looking more at innovation. And so I think it's a it it really comes down to communication, making sure that you and your colleagues are on the same page and they're always going back to, hey. What's the company's strategic plan? What's our company vision?
Linda Lannen:What's our company 10 year plan look like so that we can always make sure that we are leveraging the right people and the right priorities at the at the right time.
Greg Moss:Years ago, there were many verticals. Right? And you couldn't say that every company was a technology company. I think today, you could probably say most companies are technology companies. Because of this, you know, you a shift in success.
Greg Moss:Right? Everybody used to look at sales and say, if you don't have a good sales team, you're gonna fail. Right? And I feel like that's equally, equal equally accurate for technology now. I feel like based on what you're telling me, if you don't have a good technology team in place, your company could fail.
Greg Moss:Is that accurate?
Linda Lannen:I think it is. You know, I think that you you really there's there's again, if you look back at the 2 different kind of things you got to balance, right, the innovation piece and product development, it's kinda like that that is where you need to go with growth. You know, there's only so much organic growth you can do without having to get into kind of new products and new services and listening to clients on that realm. We have clients who are coming to us and asking us for help on data management. You know, we're an environmental consulting firm.
Linda Lannen:And I think that a lot of folks wouldn't have expected that conversation with a client a few years ago. So, you know, you you have to look at that from a risk perspective, from an innovation perspective, and looking at how can we help our clients solve their business problems. And so if you don't do that, you're not gonna grow. And we've all heard the attitudes about it. If you don't grow, you know
Greg Moss:You die.
Linda Lannen:You're gonna die. Right?
Alex Cole:So I
Linda Lannen:think that that's one piece of it. The other piece I would say is is, you know, I see this in another organization where I have a number of friends who work where, there's a long time CIO who doesn't do anything around innovation. And, and, you know, they're they're very focused on kind of that utility model and it being inexpensive as a percentage of revenue for what they spend on technology. And it making sure there's no security breaches, making sure the stuff is really and really, they don't even focus on does stuff work. It's really more, is it cheap, and are there no security usage?
Linda Lannen:Right? And so that's kind of how that CIO is it appears to be being measured. But that means that they have they struggle with innovation because the the the organization has a entirely different now leader that they've hired that's not, you know, in the in the same or part of the organization as the CIO, in order to, you know, focus more on innovation and new product development. And so you see that and you see these 2 organizations that kinda sit side by side, but they don't really have a great relationship. And so it's interesting to see, you know, how different organizations would, you know, react to that, but that doesn't feel like it's the right answer.
Linda Lannen:And it doesn't feel like if you've got 2 competing technology organizations that that in the long run is gonna be healthy.
Alex Cole:Linda, when it comes to striking the balance, and and you've touched on open lines of communication, great alignment with different, leaders throughout the organization to understand what their needs are and and how technology might be able to support the accomplishment of those, delivering against those needs, but accomplishing their goals. Are there any best practices, guiding principles, maybe you live by to ensure an organization or your organization at SWCA is striking the right balance?
Linda Lannen:That's a great question. Right. I think that, you know, for a key that has worked for me is setting up, you know, frequent calls on a certain rhythm with my peers and with people who, you know, many different parts of our organization. So, you know, I have a weekly one on one with the CEO, who's my boss, and then I have a weekly one on 1 with our COO. Right?
Linda Lannen:He's kind of 8% of our organization. So that's important for us to connect weekly. And we you know, it's only a 25 minute meeting, and half the time, we only go 10 minutes. Right? It doesn't necessarily mean that we go that 1, but it's a frequent check-in 1 on 1 about how can I help you, and, you know, what's going on in your organization?
Linda Lannen:You know, where can my team do better? Where what's something we haven't maybe thought of that we can help you with with operations? I think maybe there's another lesson learned in there. I was in a meeting with an executive coach I know, and I I had hired her to help my team with some kind of forming, storming, norming aspects after I had joined the organization. And and I remember it struck me because when I met with her 1 on 1 after the call, she specifically used the phrase, how can I serve you?
Linda Lannen:And I it really obviously, I remember it because it was about 2 and a half years ago. And and it it stuck with me that as somebody who serves clients that that was a really great way to to get them to kinda step back and think about that. I asked whenever I have a meeting with one of my peers, you know, what can I do to help? And people come to expect me to ask it because I've been asking them that question now for 3 years. But, it it's interesting to kinda hear people's responses to that.
Linda Lannen:You know, occasionally, I'll get, well, I don't think I have anything, but what can I do to help you? And then occasionally, you know, most often I hear something. Right? It's, oh, can you help me with this? Or do you think that there's any way we could look at this other problem that we have?
Linda Lannen:And, really, at the end of the day, you know, we are the technology consultants to our organization, and we need to be helping them with the business problems that they have. And I I think that one of the things I I try to stress with my team is making sure that our folks, regardless of their role in the organization, that that they don't become kind of the order takers at McDonald's. Right? That they're not just responding to what somebody asked for and that they're really kind of on some of those digging in to say, well, what's the what's the problem that you're trying to solve? And let's look at is there is there a different way to look at the data?
Linda Lannen:Rather than me just saying, oh, I'm gonna create Power BI report that gives you these data points. Let's back up and pick up our the data itself. Is this the right way to solve for that problem that you feel like we we your that you're having? So really looking at that from from that consultative perspective versus just responding to close a ticket. That's very transactional when I don't want our relationships to be transactional.
Alex Cole:Being a a sounding board for your teammates, your your colleagues, it sounds like that approach has proven quite quite valuable, but you also mentioned not being an order taker. Linda, I am curious how much of of your role, let alone let alone your organization's role, is is that of technology evangelist. I'm sure there's those who embrace technology or excited at the thought of the innovation, and rest assured there's others in an organization that think the status quo is okay. How often do you find yourself, flying flying the technology flag and trying to get people to embrace new ways of doing things and leveraging technology to do so?
Linda Lannen:Oh, I would say that's for me, that's on a daily basis. Right? There's there's services that we can deliver to our client projects. As an example, satellite data services. That's a good one.
Linda Lannen:Right? That we can uncover a lot of information pretty quickly and relatively inexpensively for our client projects if we use satellite data much more frequently. And that's just something that people, not haven't necessarily embraced as much as we'd like. And so I'm I'm frequently having that conversation of letting people know, like, hey. Did you know that we can get satellite data for your project site and it would cost x amount.
Linda Lannen:And that was really not that expensive for the client, and they, I think, would really benefit from it and see the value of it. And a lot of times, people just aren't aware. And some of that is due to just sort of the size of our organization, how things are how quickly things are moving, and, just lack of awareness that that's something that's available to them. And so we have to do a tremendous amount of marketing internally. And when people are so busy with their client projects, they just don't really feel like they've got the time to spend, learning about, you know, some new service that another part of your organization may be offering.
Alex Cole:Touch points, repetition, it it in this day and age, one time isn't isn't gonna stick. You gotta keep at it. So it makes sense that you're constantly evangelizing. Yeah.
Linda Lannen:We we had, significant, mostly organic growth over the past 3 years, and I think that there's some statistic. I will get it a little bit wrong, but I think 40% of our organizations went to the company less than 2 years. And so if we feel like, well, I told that person 2 years ago. Well, you told 60% of our employees 2 years ago. So what about the other 40%?
Linda Lannen:Right? So, you know, it's just recognizing that when you've got growth, the fact that you told somebody something a year and a half ago or that, yeah, we had a webinar on that, you know, and you look back at the time. And I know for me, time wise, I think, oh, yeah. I did that last month. And I go back and look, and it was on February.
Linda Lannen:I'm like, oh, I guess it wasn't last month. You know? I it seems like it was last month and maybe that speaks to my age, but, it just sort of things that things seem to be moving so rapidly that I think we underestimate the amount of folks who've joined or the amount of folks who haven't gotten the message for 1 reason.
Greg Moss:You know, I I have, you know, it ties back into the last the last response, but I've had a lot of of my executive leadership group come to me with, the same response. We don't have budget. You know? Now this doesn't sound the same from every company. Like, if you're born a technology company, you know, obviously, it's a technology company.
Greg Moss:But, inherently, a lot of the chief financial officers and the chief technology officers seem to have some sort of rivalry going on for budget. You know, is this really an uphill battle, and and how do you address, some of these challenges that ultimately would would gatekeep you from innovation or existing infrastructure?
Linda Lannen:Oh, that's a good question. I think that one of the things that we do very well at SWCA is that there's, the the the kind of the overhead budget, right, is managed really very well, but that doesn't mean that anybody's really in my business and looking at what our expenses were on a month to month or week to week basis. Right? And when we prepare our month our annual budgets, you know, I I have a number. Right?
Linda Lannen:And I find a way to get to that number, but I'm not nobody's questioning whether or not it's appropriate for me to spend, you know, $6,000 on a meeting to get all of my leaders together, you know, in March. Right? Nobody's gonna question something that isn't a minutiae like that or whether or not, you know, we should be using a Gartner or somebody like that, you know, because, the the price of those funds and services appears high. The value with my opinion that you get if you leverage them appropriately is much higher than the cost. And so I look at some of those things as investments, but explaining that to some other folks can be difficult.
Linda Lannen:So I think that in other organizations I've been, there's certainly conflict, I would say, on in between the c the CFO and the CIO or the CTO in terms of, you know, just wanting to make sure that that number is as low as possible. And, you know, when when you are also trying to do as much as possible around new product development, innovation, you're getting asked those questions. You have to have some money set as whether it's set aside or not, but you gotta have some time, which equates to my to to be looking at those things. Maybe that is a few extra headcount in a small group. You know, it doesn't matter.
Linda Lannen:Or maybe it's, you know, that you have a group of folks that are expected to spend 10 10% of their time on new product development. But you gotta have some way that people know that they have time to be looking at the new things versus just trying to, you know, as I said, keep things alive and make sure we don't have, breaches. So you you gotta have some numbers there. You gotta have some way to do funding that.
Greg Moss:Yeah. The CFOs tend to understand operationally how a business works. Right? But, technically, no. And that's I see that how how that could post challenge.
Linda Lannen:Cool. Yeah. Yeah. One of the ways we do that too is that we we do we get revenue from some of the technology services from our clients. And so we kind of that goes into fund, some of the other work that we do around not just supporting those services, but looking at new things.
Alex Cole:To that point, Linda, you you mentioned allocating time to focus on what what might be next. But as we've established, this landscape changes by the second. How do you keep your finger on the pulse of something that's constantly changing? I'm not sure how large your team is, but it sounds like a portion of time is dedicated to to that pursuit. But are there other resources that you leverage to to keep up to speed on the latest and the greatest?
Linda Lannen:You know, that, boy, that's a good question. That it I always feel like there's one more article I should read. Right? And so or one more, you know, trade trade where I I should be looking at. I look at a wide variety of things.
Linda Lannen:I think it's important if you always kind of have you know, I I I'm in some ways, I'm kinda old school. Right? And I probably read, you know, 7 habits of Highly Effective People 30 years ago. When you think about that whole notion of sharpening the saw that that, you know, whole series from Franklin probably talked about, I think it's pretty similar. Right?
Linda Lannen:But you've gotta, like, if you're if you constantly have your nose to the grindstone, so to speak, and you're not, like, taking a break and looking up and sharpening your tools, sharpening your saw, it's just gonna take longer. And you gotta take that that rest and look around and see what's happening. And I think, you know, I do that because I belong to a few different, you know, kind of industry organizations and our architecture engineering consulting industry. There's there's a group, the consulting group that sponsors an annual, you know, technology conference, and they publish articles about what's going on in technology in AEC. I try to keep aware of those things.
Linda Lannen:I belong to I use an organization called Infotech Research Group, which is a smaller competitor to Gartner and Forrester. I try to pop pop in on their website once a week and settled to see, like, what's the new stuff they're publishing. You know, we not just sort of, you know, things like cio.com, but I'll show, like, I have you know, sitting on my piece here that I've had sitting here for probably a year is our business review. And and then our a couple of they they now seem to be having pretty frequent articles about art artificial intelligence and just sort of what a company should be leveraging. So I'm constantly looking at things ranging from, you know, business management leadership to, you know, diversity, equity, and inclusion, you know, groups.
Linda Lannen:There's all, I happen to live in San Diego metropolitan area, and there's a group here called Athena that is a STEM women's organization, that advocates, for women learning, whether it's life sciences or technology, you know, and and putting doing much more professional development there. So I I'm always kinda looking around the landscape. I also happen to be a board director, for a small service tree farm, in Boulder, Colorado called Rule 4. And, so on that end of my life, I I recently completed a board certification for employee owned firms. So I it's there's a lot of pieces.
Linda Lannen:Right? There's that I'm always drawing from. I'm drawing from my experience, in technology, but also as somebody who's worked for employee owned firms for the better part of the last 25 years and thinking about my well, you know, what I thought about things as an employee versus as a leader versus the board member. But I kinda draw from a lot of different aspects of my life.
Greg Moss:I mean, that's a breath of fresh air for me to hear. You know, I I I see a lot of knee jerk Gartner, you know, comments. And, you know, Gartner, 20 years ago when technology wasn't complicated, didn't have a new have have its nuances, you know, kind of a ubiquitous description was fine. You know, now it's latency. Now it's, you know, on ramps.
Greg Moss:I mean, there's just so many things. Right? And Gartner doesn't do a very good job at being agile and bringing those kind of nuances into the mix. So to hear you're doing all those things is really interesting, and I think people out there should be listening.
Linda Lannen:Well, thank you. I think, you know, the other piece I don't mean to beg on Gartner, but I think that, you know, a lot of those organizations struggle with who their client is. Is the client the vendor of the solution? Is the client the CIO or the CTO of a Fortune 500 company? Or is our client the CIO or the CTO of a 500 person firm?
Linda Lannen:Like and when when when you are making recommendations to, a CIO, it absolutely matters whether or not they have you know, what their budget is and what the percentage of their revenue they're expected to spend is. And, you know, my industry sits on the lower end of that. Right? And I have spoken to CIOs at banks and and, you know, they get, like, 50% of their net their net revenue to spend on technology, and I get way less than that. It's a fraction of that.
Linda Lannen:And it's not I'm not saying it should be different, but it's, you know, I I literally had some of those bigger, I'll just say, bigger advisory groups tell me they don't know how we do it in smaller organizations. They I don't know how you do it when you got, you know, 2,000 employees and you got, you know, 40 people in IT. Like, I just don't get it. So, so there's there's absolutely a difference there, and I think you need to kinda shop for, you know, which advisory group understands either your industry or your part of the market thus because they're not all the same.
Alex Cole:Tapping into your your community, your network is is highly beneficial. We have have many clients at Upstack come to us and say, I got a lot on my plate, understandably. So can you just help keep me up to speed on the latest and the greatest? And that's one of the many roles we we play and other third party advisers can certainly play. So shout out for the advisors out there.
Alex Cole:Linda, you did mention AI. I believe that's the second mention of AI in this podcast. I think I touched on it at the top. We lasted almost 40 minutes, so good on us, but let's, let's, let's maybe we set it aside just for a moment. I'm very curious.
Alex Cole:What emerging technologies are are you tapping into to drive SWCA forward at the moment, and and what led you to to leveraging those solutions 1st place?
Linda Lannen:Yeah. I think that's a good question. You know, I think that we're certainly leveraging AI. We've, we have a great talented small mining team working on those solutions, both for our employees and for our clients to leverage it. So we actually, we have our own internal chatbot, the SWCA now that we use so that we can make sure that that our data is our data and it's not getting out there, and, you know, being one of you know, we're we're entering a a paper into an OpenAI product and asking it to help us with writing, you know, which I know some of our competitors should run.
Linda Lannen:And then that data becomes, you know, one of the property of OpenAI. They data is now currency. And I think that there's a there's a lot there we have to keep our eye on from security perspective. And that's where that kind of balance is really important because we have a lot of people coming at us and saying, we gotta leverage this. We gotta leverage this.
Linda Lannen:We gotta leverage this. And we're like, yep. We do. And we have to do it safely and keep our data our data. So there's ways we get the balance so expensive things.
Linda Lannen:Certainly, artificial intelligence is something we've been working on a long time. The the LLMs are large language models and the the text capabilities is, I'll say, relatively new now. I guess it's a year and a half out, something like that, in terms of, when chat g p two was was launched. Absolutely. There's there's ways we wanna leverage that and ways we do use that.
Linda Lannen:I mentioned satellite data previously. We're leveraging that a lot. We we use a tremendous amount of geospatial data because of the nature of our work. We have some of the best folks at merging those two worlds in what we call GOII on our team. Really the the number one vendor in the US, for geospatial software is a company called ESRI.
Linda Lannen:ESRI has kinda told us that, we have a scientist named Josh Bailey, and Josh is on my team. And he's done amazing stuff around GOAI that nobody else is doing. And so that's really important for us to look at sort of where we use AI and how do we use it, what what's the benefit of it, and making sure that we're we also leverage it in a manner where we recognize that something like ChattCPT isn't an expert. It's more like an intern that's got a tremendous amount of time and and, type really fast. But we like to go back and QA the the information it gives us.
Linda Lannen:Right? It's it's gonna have errors. It's gonna hallucinate sometimes. It's gonna just give you the wrong answer once in a while. You gotta be able to to spot those kinds of things.
Linda Lannen:If it's must be
Alex Cole:a college intern if it's hallucinating at times.
Linda Lannen:Well, I wasn't gonna go there. But yeah.
Alex Cole:So Save save space, Upset Podcast. That's I I love the personification of AI in that way. So we we you touched on the elephant in the room. Have you found. You when it comes to AI, because you are a consultancy at SWCA clients coming to you and saying, what should our AI strategy be?
Alex Cole:We must have one. It's we have those conversations. We welcome those conversations, but it doesn't necessarily apply to every business or or industry in a meaningful way. So we can call it the hype cycle. Right, Greg?
Alex Cole:Gotta gotta be aware of the the hype cycle. But curious if if you I'm sure you're having those conversations with clients and and maybe those are becoming more frequent conversations.
Linda Lannen:We are having those conversations. I think that it's probably less of the, you know, what should our strategy be, but more of the where where where can can SWCA leverage AI and the work that they do for us? And and are you keeping our and the other but the flip side of the model is I don't make sure our data is safe. So we do have some clients who have asked us not to use it. And so it's it's always balanced.
Linda Lannen:Right? You you can't scrape a policy for 1 client, and and and realize that, like, that's an impact of a client. So there's clients on both sides of all that, you know, really want you to use it because it's more efficient and feel like you're gonna get a better answer, and there's clients who are like, nope. I do not want that anywhere near my project. So being able to have that agility and flexibility to manage both kinds of clients and have an infrastructure in place, for both options is important.
Linda Lannen:Interesting.
Alex Cole:So at times, you're you're playing that that sounding board role, but also at other times, maybe back to the putting the evangelist hat on where there could be clients who would really benefit from embracing AI. Oh, it is everything is a balance.
Greg Moss:I just wanted to add on to the AI conversation. You know, we've noticed in the industry 3 major pillars. Right? AI for profit, you know, AI for indirect value, whether it's saving time, and then obviously, as a barrier to entry. Are you capitalizing on all three of those pillars, or are you focused more on 1?
Linda Lannen:No. I think it's and I would say it's probably all three pillars. I mean, there's there's not one piece where you look at AI. I think that we see that there's certainly efficiencies out there in terms of, you know, gathering information from, you know, regulatory websites and things like that. Right?
Linda Lannen:That would just take us a tremendous amount of time when people do that by hand. But I think that there's there's certainly efficiencies and productivity gains there. I think that there's also a piece where there's if you leverage insights, I was talking about this this morning, in fact, that not with language models per se, but with predictive modeling in AI. There's probably some financial insights you can gain, with with use of AI and some of those pieces that would be that would help us from a competitive standpoint. I was at a board meeting recently, and and one of the board members asked us in terms of AI and and cybersecurity, like, won't this help us?
Linda Lannen:Like, soon we'd be able to do, you know, cybersecurity easier, faster, better, cheaper. And I was like, well, yes. And the bad guys are using it too to create new threats. So AI in terms of cybersecurity means it's it's becoming an actually, it always has been, but it's exacerbating the arms race of cybersecurity. It's another tool, another weapon, if you will, and everybody's gotta have it.
Linda Lannen:Right? So the the tools that you have, that you use to prevent, you know, threats, are needed to be I need that now to use AI, but that's because the threats out there are using AI. Right? So
Alex Cole:Linda, how have you integrated third party expertise into your approach?
Linda Lannen:There's a few different ways that over my career, I learned kind of where those fit. I think one of them is, as I mentioned before, we we we we do it as a way. We we let we talk to people. Right? Whether it's, people we work with in the past, you know, as coworkers, and maybe now we're not coworkers anymore, but we still have respect for what somebody knows and and looks at and does.
Linda Lannen:And so, I think we leverage people from that perspective on an informal basis. We do we have our partners like Upstack who we know are experts, and we see them as an extension of our team, in many ways. There's a a similar relationship we have, with 1 individual. You know, we we sort of aren't big enough to have a network architect yet. We have a we have complex needs.
Linda Lannen:And so, like, for some roles like that, right, we don't have a network architect on staff, but we have a relationship with a trusted third party who we use as consultant. Who can is really seen as kind of an extension of our team. And is there, one we need them. So we've it's really important to to find those folks to continue those relationships and to know where they play and then also to make sure that those relationships aren't just with you, but they're with the your team and that they know who the players are and what their role is and what expectations are.
Alex Cole:Gang, is there is there anything we haven't covered before we we wrap up here?
Greg Moss:I feel like I'm smarter.
Alex Cole:It's why I wanna create this podcast. I needed to up up my game, so I I too feel smarter. Linda, anything to add?
Linda Lannen:I don't think so. It's been fun. Thanks for giving me some time and voice today.
Alex Cole:This has been fun. Thank you again for joining us. Here we are. We've we've gone inside the mind of the CTO. And to Greg's point, we are a little bit smarter.
Alex Cole:Linda, we appreciate it. Listeners, thank you as always for following along with us. Greg Moss, couldn't do without you.
Greg Moss:Thank you, sir. It's been
Alex Cole:another episode of the Upstack podcast. We will see you next time. Thank you for listening to the Upsack podcast. Don't forget to like or subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you next time.
