Carolyn Ford:  Today on Tech Transforms, I'm talking with James Davies, CEO of Kinetic Data. He's a leader who's worked everywhere from the help desk back in the days of dial-up, answering those angry calls, all the way to the C-suite. And that journey really shows.


We get into why digital transformation isn't a software shopping spree; it's systems thinking. Why the real breakdowns don't happen inside departments, but in the handoffs between them. And why "one-stop shop" platforms sometimes translate to "Hotel California" for your data.


James makes the case for composable architectures, building organizations that can unplug and plug in technology without detonating the user experience. Because in a world where AI can spin up new tools overnight, locking yourself into one vendor's roadmap is less strategy and more surrender.


We also talk about shadow spreadsheets, onboarding that takes six weeks (which is not a great first impression), and why security has to be a design principle, not a bolt-on apology.


So, James, you've worked at nearly every layer of the technology stack from the frontline support to CEO. Now, how has that shaped the way you think about digital transformation at the leadership level?


James Davies: It's a great question. So yeah, when I, you know, when I started my career, I actually worked on a help desk. Um, and I was answering calls from sometimes upset and angry customers. In this case, it was—my first job was actually on the help desk of a phone company. And—and for maybe some of your audience won't remember this, but in the days of dial-up, you know, they couldn't get connected to the internet. And so I saw kind of firsthand, um, you know, the—the pains that someone that's on that side of the phone has to deal with, you know, answering customers' questions. And immediately started looking for ways to reduce friction.


So, you know, as I progressed in my career and now running a software company that—that helps with some of those problems, improving customer experience and process efficiency, etc. Um, it's really good that—or was—it's been really helpful for me to have that background knowledge of like the boots on the ground. What are they actually dealing with and how can we make their jobs easier? And so, you know, I just—I—I love that I've had that—that experience of—of being in many different roles because it helps me to have empathy for—for what those folks are going through. And helps me to guide the company and really our product to help to solve some of those—those key problems.


Carolyn Ford: Yeah. No, you're not kidding. You were on the front lines and I remember those days—the pain of trying to do dial-up. And it just made me think about security and technology in general and how if it's not easy and intuitive, we—we don't use it, right? We—we've really gotten spoiled. Sorry, Steve Jobs kind of wrecked us all.


James Davies: Yes.


Carolyn Ford: Because we don't work for it anymore, right? Like, if it's not just there, then we're just not going to use it.


James Davies: Absolutely. And I think, you know, companies need to think that way about not only their employees, but how they serve their customers. You know, they're—they just—they don't want to pick up the phone anymore. They want to be able to self-serve and—and, um, get it done quickly. And yeah, the iPhone changed the world.


Carolyn Ford: Yeah. Yeah. And—and especially now with, you know, our different generative AI platforms, um, whether they're wrong or right, we believe them. So, but I mean, it's so easy to get those answers ourselves, right? Um, you know, we talk about, especially in public sector modernization, digital transformation, a lot of companies or organizations treat it like a software upgrade. And you often talk about systems thinking—like the systems themselves thinking, right? Talk to me about that. What's the difference between this software upgrade and the systems thinking themselves? It kind of sounds a little bit scary.


James Davies Davies: Well, um, when I say systems thinking, I think I really like, um—I think architecture really matters when—when going after a transformation project. Or, you know, I don't even like to think of transformation as a project. It's something that goes on forever. And if you take that perspective, you really need to think about the investments that you're making very wisely. Um, I—I'm a big proponent of a composable architecture where you can have best-of-breed software in different areas of an organization. Um, and you want to have an architecture that allows you to unplug and plug in new tools, new software, uh, as quickly as possible with as minimal, uh, chaos and risk as possible.


And so, uh, I think many times organizations say like, "Hey, there's this area in my organization, maybe it's HR or finance or something like that, and our processes are old. We need to do," quote unquote, "digital transformation." And many times what organizations do is they say, "Okay, let's look for," uh, you know, "let's look—let's look for the latest finance system or the latest HR system," and they start with the software instead of starting with the outcome that they're trying to achieve. And—and—and when you do that, then all of a sudden you get these kind of pockets of modernization or—or transformation around your organization. And because it wasn't thought of like, "Hey, at—in the end, what we're really trying to achieve is that—that finance needs to know what HR is doing, and these systems need to integrate, and they need to talk together." And, oh, by the way, we also want it to be easy—we talked about this a little bit earlier—and like a consumer-like experience for our employees to interact with that.


And if you don't kind of sit down and think about what those outcomes are, it's really easy to just pick a piece of software—maybe it's a popular piece of software that you feel like is a—is a safe decision to make—that may pigeonhole you down the line. Um, and so—so again, we're, yeah, we're big proponents of kind of thinking about what are the outcomes we're trying to achieve. And customer experience, as we talked about a little bit earlier, that needs to be like front and center. And how does this—this technology upgrade or modernization that we're doing play into that long-term story of what we're trying to achieve?


It sounds kind of basic, but it—just I see it over and over again. "Hey, we've got this HR problem. Let's go get the latest, you know, latest and greatest, you know, top right of the magic quadrant HR system, and that's going to solve all—all of our problems." And I think if you don't peel back the onion a couple more layers and think about, okay, how is this really going to work in the overall ecosystem, you're going to wind up having a digital transformation project every three to five years instead of a—a project—or instead of a program, so to speak, that's—you're continually, you know, leveraging the—the greatest, the latest and greatest technologies that, um, help make your—your business as efficient as possible, right?


Carolyn Ford: And if transformation is an ongoing—I really like what you said, that transformation is an evolution. And if it's not an ongoing thing, it's not transformation anymore. And it makes you irrelevant, right? So, and I'm seeing the speed up. I mean, we—there's—everyone's obviously talking about AI. And you know, one of the things that AI is doing is making it so that software companies and even just a regular organization can create their own software and create it really, really quickly.


James Davies: That's right.


Carolyn Ford: And so there's, you know, there's some big-name products out there, again, in the HR space, the IT space, etc., that kind of large organizations, especially in the government sector, just kind of go with, and they're extremely expensive. But, you know, if these new AI tools pop up or AI allows you to create software a lot quicker, you might want to leverage a new one that's—that's, um, that's faster, that's cheaper, that's better for whatever reason. If you—if you architect your entire digital transformation strategy around a single vendor and its roadmap, you're going to be locked into that. It's—it's nearly impossible to change, which—which gets us into vendor lock, which I—I think we can talk about in a little bit.


Carolyn Ford: Yeah. So if you think about an organization like a city—like a city infrastructure—when you help organizations modernize, transform, what are some of the bridges or tunnels that you see in this, you know, city metaphor as part of the organization's processes? What—what are some of the bridges and tunnels that get ignored until there's a traffic jam or, you know, the—the water's backed up so far that we're in trouble?


James Davies: We—we—we tend to operate in silos, and it's just, I think, it's just we—we—we try to find our like our little—our—our—our little communities, um, even within a—within a big organization. So again, in a—on the commercial side, it's like a finance team and an HR team, etc. Um, but the biggest breakdown that I always find in gaining efficiencies is the handoffs between teams. You know, there's—there's a lot of processes that—that cross between teams or it starts with one team and then moves to another. Um, and so you kind of need this—a way to—to make those—those handoffs simple.


And part of that is integrations with—with different, um, with different systems and where people are working. Um, and then part of that is—is the user experience. I call that the glass sometimes. So, you've probably worked for an organization and—and had to kind of start a process in system A, and you finish it, and you maybe you get a ticket number at the end, and then you got to re-enter all that information into system B and then into system C. I mean, it's—it's just all over the place. And so, um, if an organization can own what I call the glass or the user experience, the windshield so to speak, and they can have kind of at a—at a higher level some control over what that looks like, how that works, and then allow these silos to kind of participate with their own systems, their own processes, etc.


That glue helps you to—to really stitch together the organization and—and make it feel like one thing. And then—and—and I see that that's where a lot of the, um, efficiency gains are that you'll get. And it's because it—it helps to move, uh—move the process forward when there's handoffs between teams. Mhm. So, it—that gets down—it does get down into—to integrations and—and how integrations work with—with different things.


But I think if you peel that—peel back the onion even more, it's like what's the experience need to be like for—for an end user when they're having to interact with what they think of as one process, but it might cross between many teams and—and—and break down the friction there. That's where things get jammed up, you know, and something didn't get entered the right way into system B after doing, you know, starting its process in system A. Mhm.


Carolyn Ford: I imagine that most of these initiatives are owned by IT. Is that true?


James Davies: Sometimes. Like, what we try to—what our—what our software does, what we aim to do is enable the people closest to the problem to solve the problem. But there needs to be guardrails. There needs to be governance around security. There needs to be guardrails around, um, look and feel and—and the user experience so that it feels consistent, consistent.


And I think many tools out there, what—what winds up happening is, you know, those tools get deployed, they get owned by IT, which means that every change that needs to get made has to be made by IT in order to do it safely, and that then creates backlogs. Um, you can't make a change, you know, add a field to this form or change your workflow or something like that if it takes them four or five months. What winds up happening is then the business is like, "This is taking too long. I'm just going to buy my own tool, or I'm just going to start doing this in a spreadsheet." And you go backwards.


Um, but I—I what we try to do, I think IT slash, you know, a lot of organizations have like a digital transformation office, need to own the overarching framework and then enable—choose technology—it gets back to the—the systems thinking—choose technology that enables people closest to the business to be able to solve their problems, um, with software that allows them to do that with guardrails.


Carolyn Ford: Can you tell me a story? Like, walk me through a recent problem that you were helping, um, an agency solve. And—and if you can, like tell me—tell me what the objective was, what you were trying—what they were trying to do, and how you helped them.


James Davies: Yeah. Um, so—so one that comes to mind—there's, well, there's—there's lots, but, uh, we deal with a lot of organizations that are providing us, you know—so we do a lot of business with the—the federal government, uh, both DoD and—and civilian, uh, agencies. And we—our—our software really works well with organizations that are providing a service. Um, that service could be HR services or IT services or something like that, um, and it could be to both internal customers, i.e., employees, or external customers, i.e., you know, end customers. And so, one of the biggest challenges that—that we've found has been around, uh, onboarding of new customers. Again, they could be employees as a customer. Um, this is like the age-old challenge. It's so hard, right?


But onboarding isn't just people in my mind. I think of like you can be onboarding a server. I mean, you can be onboarding a system. There's—but like there's processes for getting things on a network. There's processes for getting people connected or—or onboard. And many organizations, especially if in the government space, there's fee-for—fee-for-service organizations or where they're like charging for this service internally to the organization—shared services on the on the, uh, more on the industry commercial side. And the longer it takes for them to onboard, the—well, the longer it takes for them to get, quote unquote, "revenue" in the door. Um, and then they're having a really difficult time scaling because it's taking so—so long for them to onboard.


So, um, that's what we do a lot. And so there—there's a specific example—one of our—our Air Force customers, they provide a service and, uh, you know, it takes them currently six to eight weeks to onboard their customer into their service. And it's a series of spreadsheets that are getting passed back and forth. Those spreadsheets need to go through a team of analysts that then have to involve, you know, procurement. They have to involve finance. They have to involve IT, involve security, and they get passed around. You know, it's a shared mailbox that's kind of managing the—the project and the process.


And meanwhile, the customer is like, "I gave you all this information. What's taking so long? I can go out to AWS and I can spin up an entire infrastructure like that. Why can't I get it from you? That's how I want to consume it." And so—so what we did is we came in and we said like, "What do your end users want to be able to do?" Well, if they're a new user, they want to say like, "Hey, I'm interested in learning more about this service." And so, you know, we provide a system that allows them to fill out some basic information, takes—it creates a ticket in their CRM. Um, and then the, you know, this—this quote unquote "salespeople" can kind of interface with the customer, understand their needs, are they a good fit, bad fit? If they're a good fit, they mark it as good fit in the CRM. Our system takes over and then basically says, you know, "Hey, here's some information that we need to gather from you in order to get you onboarded." And it's all done in a web-based thing that you can do on your cell phone.


Um, and then that information is then broken down and given to procurement, finance, IT, security, etc. in—in the systems that they're used to working with. Like, some people work in Jira, some people work in monday.com—you know, they're all over the place. Um, and so it's—it's that glue that's stitching it together is—that's where—that's where—well, that's why customers bring us in, and that's really our sweet spot is, you know, there's—there's—there's multiple systems, multiple teams involved, and they need a better—they need to do a better job providing visibility to the customer as to where they're at in the process. Um, automating different steps that can be automated, uh, and then giving people work where they work.


Carolyn Ford: Right. So you help set all of that automation up. You figure out what their objectives are, what the triggers are, what comes next, and you set up that workflow. So once it's in place, you know, you bring Carolyn on, and then when you bring James on next week, the process is already there, right? And then ideally, Carolyn wants to invite, you know, three other people from her team, and—and so like creating that functionality where it's like—it's like Verizon, you know, you go into Verizon to pay your cell phone bill. You can say, "Hey, my wife needs to be able to manage that." Gives her a login.


So, right, so it all—it all starts with the, you know, what are—what do your users want to be able to do? What's going to make them happy? Um, what's going to make them want to use the system versus sending an email or picking up the phone? And if you get that right, then you'll actually get adoption, which makes the entire digital transformation project actually worth it.


Carolyn Ford: That's right. It's so—they can—it's easy now, right? It's easy to access, and they'll use it if you don't make it better than the—


James Davies: Yeah. There's so many, you know, a lot of people talk about change management and problems with organizational change, etc. And it's—I always think if—if the alternative that you're providing is not better than what was there, you're not going to get adoption. I mean, that change is going to be so much harder. If you make it easier, more familiar to what they do at home, then you'll actually get adoption. People will use the system, and then you'll get value out of it. You'll drive efficiencies.


Carolyn Ford: What about security? Um, it's a problem when it gets bolted on at the end. Mhm. Talk about what kind of changes happen when security becomes a design principle as you're setting up these—these systems.


James Davies: Yeah, you know, in—in our case, we're really providing our customers with a framework for—for building out great digital experiences and work, you know, in modernizing their workflows. And so, we take a lot of that on as a—as a vendor behind the scenes and giving them the capability to configure who should have access to what. We take care of like end-to-end encryption and all of that stuff on our end. Um, so—so what—so what our customers actually have to do from a security standpoint, it really—it really starts with the—you when we're talking through the user experience and saying, "Okay, well then it needs to do this." And then we pause and have to say, "Who should be able to do that? Why should they be able to do that? How does that need to be audited, etc.?" and kind of capture that. Then it's just—it's configuration within our system.


Um, from a—from our perspective as a software vendor, uh, it's—it's—it's imperative that we think about security day one versus after the fact because, you know, when for building that underlying foundation. We need to—we need to have the capability for people to audit things, you know, what, um—to annotate what—what information is—is secure, to set up encryption, etc. All of that kind of stuff, um, that's really hard to—to—to bolt on later. Um, so from our standpoint, it's always just kind of—that's been one of the legs of the stool of our—of our—our software and our company is—is—is what are these security requirements and building them into our software. And then how do we make it easier for our customers when they're configuring our software to, um, achieve the—the—the compliance that they need on their side? And so for us, that's exposing effectively toggles, um, and configuration for—for what the software needs to do from a security perspective and, you know, who should have access to what, etc.


Carolyn Ford: Okay. In highly regulated mission-critical environments—you say you work with the federal government, so—so we know what we're talking about here—visibility is really important. What are some practical steps that you can offer leaders to—to gain true visibility into how workflows actually happen across their organization?


James Davies: Yeah. So, I could take this from a—in a couple different directions, but the—the one that comes up most is there's so many, especially in the federal government, there's so many processes that are initiated via email. I mean, if you go to government websites as a—as a citizen, it's "contact this mailbox." It's like, literally, it's just an email box.


Carolyn Ford: Yeah.


James Davies: And we all know, like, there's no way for you to measure—


Carolyn Ford: If you can even find that contact, like—like avenue, right? If you can even find it, right?


James Davies: And—and so to me, the—it starts with a baseline. And if you can't measure how many—at least the—the, um, count or how many times a process is happening, that's like—that's number one. Number two is, how long is it taking in this process? Number three is, how long is each step taking in this process? And so what I always advise customers to do is like, start with that number one. Get a—get a system in place where you—where you can start counting how many times this process happened. Like, I'm a big believer—it can't be manual. It can't—I mean, and no matter how good your intentions are and how good you think you are, anything that's manual is not going to happen. You've got to have automated reporting, right?


Carolyn Ford: Absolutely.


James Davies: And so—so it starts with that. And so, you know, many times a customer will come to us and say, you know, "We want to modernize this business process, and—and it's got all of these integrations, and it's really, really complicated."And we can—we say, "Well, how many times a year does that happen, or how many times a week or a month?" And they have no clue. And so my recommendation is always like, start simple, stand up something where you can say, you know, "Initiate this process," you know, "feed it some information, and then—and then all the workflow needs to do is send an email like it did today." Now we actually can start tracking how many times did this thing happen.


Um, now an organization that has lots of different processes that they want to automate, it's like, get a catalog of those processes together and let people start requesting them. And then that helps to start creating a backlog or prioritizing your backlog of, okay, where do we start with automation? So like, you wouldn't start with automation on the process that happens 10 times a year. You want the one that happens a thousand times a day or 10,000 times a day. Um, and then replace that "send an email" with, you know, the next step, the next step, the next step. And then so that—that's how you can kind of gradually roll something like this out. You're not going to be able to swallow the elephant whole.


So it starts with like, how many times does this thing happen? Okay, now that we know that across a bunch of different processes, let's focus on the highest—the—the processes that happen the most. And then once you have that down, it's okay, um, what processes are taking the longest? How do we get efficiencies in there? Where are the bottlenecks? And if—if you don't have a system for—for tracking that stuff, there's—there's—there's going to be no way to measure. And so the—again, the first step, it—for free, you can do it with, you know, I'm sure a Power App or a Google Form or something like that. Like, "Here's what I need. Put it in a spreadsheet." Now we can at least start tracking that, and I think—


Carolyn Ford: Your baseline.


James Davies: Leaders aren't paying—they have no idea what's going on in an organization because so many of these second-order processes that take up so much time are, um, are being done manually today. And—and I get the sense—this is—this is not a broad-brush statement, but many leaders think, "I can sprinkle some AI magic across it and it's just going to work." I think you have to have an understanding of, here's where AI will provide value at this step of this process, and here's what I'm expecting, um, to achieve. And you need a foundational system in place for tracking, you know, here's what's happening in my organization.


Carolyn Ford: Right. Right. What about shadow workflows—like your—your spreadsheet side hustles? Um, what kind of risk do they introduce? How can leaders surface them without creating any blame or shame?


James Davies: Yeah, I mean, I think it starts with, uh—having a—for me, empathy is like—is the biggest leadership quality that—that I need to have. And we—we started the conversation talking about it. I've kind of been in these shoes, so I understand that, you know, I think people in general, they want the best for their organization, and they—they see something that's inefficient, and they say, "We've got to do this better." So they create a spreadsheet because that's what they can do. Um, and I think if—if leaders say, "Hey, I really appreciate that you guys want to make this better. I want to make it better, too. Where are these rogue spreadsheets? Where do these live?" and like, kind of get the defenses down. Like, let's just—let's just get an inventory of them. And then we can start to roll that up into, now how do we make this even better than a spreadsheet? "You've taken it this far. Thanks, employee. But let's take it to the next level." Um, I think—I think it really starts like from—you've got to set that so that there's not fear in saying, "Oh, I've got my hidden little, you know, uh, side-hustle spreadsheet."


Um, and—and then once that's out there, uh, I think then you can start to—well, then you at least know that they exist, and you start to put a system in place like we talked about earlier for saying, "Well, how many times is this happening? How do things get into that spreadsheet? How do, you know—how do those rows start accumulating?" Um, and then—and then you can start measuring things. But if you can't measure anything, it's like—it's not even worth it to do a digital transformation project if you don't know what your baseline is and then—and then, you know, where you're trying to get to.


Carolyn Ford: All right, we're going to take a quick pause here and thank our sponsor who makes these conversations possible. This episode is sponsored by Owl Cyber Defense, a pure-play cybersecurity company delivering made-in-the-USA data diode and cross-domain solutions trusted to protect some of the most sensitive government and commercial networks worldwide. Owl enables secure, near-instant collaboration across network boundaries, helping military, federal, and critical infrastructure organizations make faster, safer decisions. To learn more, visit owlcyberdefense.com.


And we're back. All right. You mentioned vendor lock-in early—or earlier in the conversation. Um, talk about what kind of cost vendor lock-in is for—yeah. Well, actually, you've—I've heard you frame vendor lock-in not necessarily as a cost issue, although I think there is a cost issue there, but you talk about it as a—as a strategic and even a security risk. So talk about that.


James Davies: Yeah, I mean, I—that I mentioned earlier, a lot of times organizations, they—they choose—they choose the technology before they understand what the outcome is that they're trying to achieve. And—and so if you think about that, you know, there's—I'm just—I'll just pick on, you know, HR software. You go into the Gartner Magic Quadrant and you say, "Okay, here's the—the three vendors that do, you know, HR software. Let's pick one, and then let's do all of our HR stuff inside of that platform, and that's out of that one platform." There's—especially with HR, I mean, we talked a little bit about onboarding of people—like, every organization does that different. They all have different systems that need—the users need to be provisioned in, they have different payroll systems, etc., etc. There's—there's no way a vendor can—can build a perfect HR system for everyone, and so you always have to customize that.


And so there's hidden risks there in that as you start to customize something that a vendor gave you off the shelf, then that vendor gives you an upgrade. Now you've got to revisit all of your customizations. I can't tell you how many times I've worked with an organization that they have a really expensive consulting firm nonstop and all, you know, 15 people on staff, and all they're doing is managing customizations through upgrades.


Carolyn Ford: Right. It's that—it's that professional services that gets you, right?


James Davies: Yeah. And that's—so that's part of the—that's part of the cost issue. Um, but then there's also—there's the—the other risk is many times these systems, especially if you're exposing them to, in the case of, you know, the DoD, you know, over a million employees, right? And they're—they've been trained on how to use that. If you ever want to replace that system because you've done everything in it, it is—like, it becomes like cement. Like, you actually can't—if there's a better vendor, a cheaper vendor, uh, you know, a vendor that's using AI in a unique way that you want to go and use because of the whole thing, it's—it's nearly impossible to replace. I mean, the Navy's—the Navy's been trying to upgrade their ERP system for over 25 years. I mean, it's—it's—it's insane.


Um, now if you take a best-of-breed approach and say like, "Hey, here's what we're going to use for order-to-cash. You know, here's what we're going to use for these different processes," and then you overlay it or stitch it together with, again, something like what we do—this integration glue—then you can take one piece of it out, and your users will never even know because they're not actually interacting directly with it. And so to me, that's the big risk, um, is that of vendor lock-in—is well, it—it removes your ability to have agility, right? And like, and it introduces fear of change, and then things don't change.


And so, so—we're a software vendor. We obviously want our customers to use our software, but I think, um, the big difference in philosophy with us is we—we—we believe in—like, we're not the only piece to the pie, and we don't think we should be the full pie. Um, and there's a lot of vendors out there, especially the big ones, that say like, "Kind of do everything in our tool." And once you do that, especially if you're exposing it to your entire organization and your entire business is kind of running on it, now you're—you're locked into that vendor. You're locked into their—the new thing is obviously AI. You're locked into their AI strategy, not the AI strategy that you need for your organization. Um, you're—you're locked into, you know, what features they think are important. You're locked into their cost model, and they're, you know, they know they've got you locked in, and so they can increase your cost because they know you can't go anywhere. The—the cost of change is too high. And so our—our—our caution is to always think about composable architectures. Make it—you want to optimize your ability to unplug things and plug other things in without affecting your user experience..


Carolyn Ford: I think—do you think we got here like you said—Air Force with their ERP system? I remember back in the day, it was, um, a selling point to say that, "We're a one-stop shop. We'll do everything for you." That was code for, "You can never—you can check in, but you can never leave. We are Hotel California."


James Davies: Yeah.When the PC got out there and—and there was, you know, apps were being created, there was like tons and tons and tons of different apps, and—and people are like, "Okay, this is getting really unwieldy." Well, that was before APIs existed—you know, standardized APIs existed, etc. And then so the pendulum swung from like, "Hey, let's have all these custom applications," all the way over to, "Let's do it all in one tool and one-stop shop, and there's one vendor's throat to choke," etc., etc.


And what I've been seeing over the last three to four years is that shift like, "Wow, this is dangerous." Like, our entire business is, um, is dependent on like this software vendor that we're using to run our systems, and—and shifting it back, so anyway, that's how I think about it. I think it's as a pendulum that's shifted from—


Carolyn Ford: I think you're right. You're right. You know what? You brought up a really good point. This was before—back in the day, there weren't APIs. It was really hard to get things to work together, and so we got that pendulum swing. But now, especially with AI, it's—it's a lot easier to get things to talk to—to each other, right?


James Davies: And then the—the other—the other risk is, is, you know, depending on these vendors, many of them own your data, you know? And so depending on the type of data and the organization that you are, um, that could be a big risk. So, well, you know, we're—we're all for putting the control back in the customer's hands. I think customers, at the end of the day, should be the ones that—that manage their business processes. I think there's—you need source of truth, you know, reliable transactional systems kind of behind the scenes. 


Carolyn Ford: Yeah. Yeah. It's really good advice. So, were you to advise a leader today that wants to start their modernization journey tomorrow, um, what—what guardrails would you insist on putting in place from the beginning, or would you advise them to put in place?


James Davies: Um, uh, we talked a little bit about this philosophy of the people closest to the problem are going to be the best at solving that problem. And so I think making sure that, you know, as you're going down this journey that, you know, the shadow IT within HR or IT or facilities or finance or who—you know, whatever the sub-organization is that has processes, are able to make changes to those processes, um, without having to get IT involved, right? Now, at the same time, whatever tool that you select, it also needs to be—and security, frankly, need to be able to impose, "Hey, you can do that, but within these guardrails." After it crosses this threshold, you need to ring the bell and actually get IT involved.


But many of the changes that people need to make are simple ones—are like, "Hey, I need to capture these two more—these two pieces of information when someone initiates this process," i.e., like drag and drop some fields to a form. You shouldn't need to get IT involved and it takes them three to six months to get that done when it's simple. That's why people go back to Excel. Um, at the same time, you know, shadow IT shouldn't be able to—potentially shouldn't be able to build new integrations to systems that they don't own. Maybe IT needs to get involved, and security needs to vet that there's policy in place for them to be able to do that. They set up the integration. Okay, now, um, shadow IT or citizen developers can actually leverage that.


So to me, it's—it's thinking about that. And then most importantly—and we already talked about this—it's like thinking about the customer journey in their customer experience and how are we going to make it simple for the customer. I've seen so many massive IT projects or systems-related projects—they get all of the requirements. They, you know, some vendor builds in, you know, all of the specs for those requirements and, you know, configures, customizes, whatever the tool. And then like right before they're about to release, they do some UAT and they start thinking, "Oh, we need to make the user experience better." Like, there's no point of doing all of that work if you're not going to get adoption. So—


Carolyn Ford: That's right.


James Davies: The user experience—like, who's—who are the boots on the ground, and how are we going to make them happier, make their jobs more satisfying to use this system versus what they're doing today? Mhm.


Carolyn Ford: What are some of the measurable impacts that you've seen within organizations since you've seen them adopt, um, these more visibility-driven processes, adaptable—you call it composable frameworks? Um, whether it's security procedures or operational efficiencies, um, what are—what are some of the measurable impacts you've seen?


James Davies: For us, it's the—the key things that we measure: how many times is a process happening? You want to see that number going up because that means you're getting adoption. And then how long does it take for that process to execute? We want to see that going down because that means that they're getting efficiency.


And then so, depending on the use case, you can then build out, you know, different metrics. So if it's a recruiting organization, you want to see more applicants going through the recruiting pipeline, but you want the recruitment pipeline application to decision to be going down, right? From a, um, onboarding of an employee, you want, you know, you want employees to be going through that process, but you want the time it takes for them to be ready to get their job done day one going down. Um, so it's a—it's really—it's always counts and durations—like, how many times is this happening and how long is it taking? And then there's flavors of that given the different use cases.


Carolyn Ford: Okay. All right. We're to the tech talk question, uh, part of our program. So, these are just fun rapid-fire—answer from the gut. All right. So, what's one legacy system that refuses to die and secretly deserves its own documentary?


James Davies: Uh, it's got to be Excel.


Carolyn Ford: I know. I love Excel, though.


James Davies: Yeah. And I mean, I've just—I've seen a lot of vendors kind of or software companies try to replace Excel. And, you know, it works well sometimes. Like, you know, there's Monday.com and Airtable and they're great tools—like, I use them actually, but like Excel is so rich. There's so much flexibility for the user that it just—it—it never dies. And it's—I mean, there's probably 10,000—I don't know, 100,000 features in there. I probably use four or 10 of them, right? Um, but just what a—what a flexible tool. Um, I mean, it's just like—it's one of the—I mean, it's probably the greatest piece of software that was—that was ever invented. It's got its dangers, um, but I think it's, yeah, that's the system that's—I don't see going anywhere.


Carolyn Ford: All right. All right. If you could automate one organizational headache forever, what would you automate?


James Davies: Employee onboarding.


Carolyn Ford: Yeah.


James Davies: And employee onboarding is—I mean, ]I think it's a known thing. We've got to—as organizations, we got to do a better job onboarding employees. But you know, that's their—that's their first impression. And you know, if they—again, I work in the government and sometimes it's six weeks before they can start working on their computer because it takes so long to get an account and stuff like that. Um, that just puts a—a bad taste in employees' mouths and has so many intangible kind of downstream effects on their—their morale, etc.


Carolyn Ford: Yes. Right. It just sets the tone. It's first impressions.


James Davies: Yeah. And when I say onboarding, I really—I also mean offboarding. We many times we forget about that, but from a security perspective, that is extremely important to have that process automated, um, and auditable.Because there's a—there's a lot of risk there, you know, when employees leave a company that they have access to a lot of information.


Carolyn Ford: All right. So final question—I'm really going to shift gears on you for a second. When you're not helping organizations, uh, automate their systems, what do you do for fun?


James Davies: So, I love to work with my hands. Uh, my dad was in construction, um, he was a mechanic as well, and so I grew up around that. And somehow I fell into this software world, and I love the software world, but I've got to scratch the itch. And so, um, as soon as I'm done I—I, you know, for the day, I—I turn off the computer, I try to mute my phone, put it on Do Not Disturb, uh, you know, and I get out into the workshop and I try to build stuff, um, fix stuff. I love working with my hands, and so—so that's, uh—that's what scratches that itch.


And I'm trying to find some ways to—to merge—merge together my software world and my construction slash, you know, um, woodworking world. And I don't know, maybe there's a piece of software that can help with that or something like that, but I haven't figured it out yet. But that's, uh, you know, what—that's what I like to do on the side.


Carolyn Ford: I think you should leave software out of it, James. I love that. I—I do the same thing. I have to just unplug and get away from all the electronics, so—


James Davies: Yeah. I mean, it's like when I'm working with my hands, like, I can actually see meaningful progress and really quickly..


Carolyn Ford: Yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining Tech Transforms today.


James Davies: Absolutely.


Carolyn Ford: And for leaders looking to modernize internal systems without creating new risk, what's one practical first step they can take this quarter, this month?


James Davies: Um, can you ask that question again? Sorry.


Carolyn Ford: Yes. So, um, for leaders looking to modernize their systems, what's one step they can take right now?


James Davies: By far, take inventory of what your processes are and what—um, and and what's the ideal state for where you want them to be. And then like, a lot of times, uh—organizations, they—they miss that step, and they just—they think like, "Hey, we got to make all of HR better, all of IT better," something like that. You've got to break it down, and you've got to have an inventory of what—what are our processes, and what are the outcomes that we're trying to achieve, and then based on that, you can then take the next step. But you've got to—you've got to kind of do an internal audit of—of what you're trying to achieve first.


Carolyn Ford: Okay. All right. And where can our listeners connect with you to learn more about your work?


James Davies: Yeah, I'm on—I'm on LinkedIn. I think my handle is jameswdavies. Um, our website is kineticdata.com.


Carolyn Ford: Okay. And we'll drop that in the show notes as well. So listeners, thanks for tuning in. Please share this episode, leave a review, and smash that like button. That helps us reach more people who could benefit from the conversation. Tech Transforms is produced by Show and Tell and sponsored by Owl Cyber Defense. Until next time, stay curious and keep imagining the future.