What's Up with Tech?
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With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Navigating IT Consolidation: QuickBase's Strategy for Streamlined Efficiency and Enhanced Productivity
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Discover the future of tech efficiency with Dalan Winbush, CIO of QuickBase, as we unpack the challenges and surprises of IT consolidation. Can consolidating your tech stack lead to both streamlined operations and happier employees? Dalan reveals insights from a recent survey, highlighting the chaos caused by disconnected systems and the frustration of juggling multiple project management tools. By examining these issues from a business leader's perspective, we emphasize the critical role of change management and collaboration to unlock enhanced productivity and superior performance across organizations.
Join us as we explore how QuickBase is revolutionizing the way businesses handle tech sprawl and project management hurdles. Dalan shares how his team leverages their own platform to gain sharper insights into resource allocation and decision-making, often resulting in a 50% reduction in tech stacks for their clients. As planning season looms, we stress the importance of IT governance in simplifying environments and driving superior ROI. Learn the strategies for engaging stakeholders and approaching consolidation strategically to maximize business value and efficiency.
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Hey everybody, Fascinating chat today with the CIO at QuickBase on insights into the QuickBase mission and vision, as well as a recent survey on IT consolidation Dalen, how are you?
Speaker 2:I'm doing well, thank you.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having me being here Always excited to chat with QuickBase. Before that, maybe introduce yourself and your role and personal mission at QuickBase and, for those who haven't heard of the company, tell us what you're up to these days. Yeah, certainly.
Speaker 2:So I'm Dalen Wimbush, as you just mentioned, I'm the CIO at QuickBase. I've been here roughly two years Seems like it's been a longer time than that. We've gotten a lot accomplished over the last two years. Seems like it's been a longer time than that. We've gotten a lot accomplished over the last two years. I've been in the IT leading IT organizations for almost over 20 years Different companies, different size organizations, from Fortune 10 to, you know, pe-backed organizations and my primary role at QuickBase is to manage and lead a strategy around our tech stack, our IT strategy, which also includes QuickBase apps that we also manage internally as well. So I have a full staff that helps me out throughout the day, but that's my primary role.
Speaker 1:Fantastic, Well thrilled to have you here, and let me ask you as we embark. I mean, what was the big idea behind the survey on IT consolidation? What was it about? Who participated, and why is it so timely, based on what's happening now in the marketplace.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely timely. So in talking with about 1000 of our customers that we surveyed, we knew that many of them were managing a lot of apps, a lot of systems, like all other IT pros across and systems in the environment to save money, time, be more efficient. So we wanted to quantify that across those 1,000 IT professionals within the US, uk, canada, united Kingdom that we surveyed to understand about their plans for technology consolidation. The state of technology sprawl is significant. It's huge through just disconnected systems, data, disparate point solutions in their environments.
Speaker 1:Yeah, great topic. So let's dive in. Particularly as an IT practitioner yourself, Any surprises from the survey? What caught your attention?
Speaker 2:One is that half of the IT professionals that we surveyed were feeling overwhelmed even the thought of consolidation.
Speaker 2:The second was those IT pros named negative human and data inconsistencies and consequences when undertaking IT consolidation, rating objects and frustration from the employees and losing access to tools. Employees love their tools. They love their data and learning new systems about 37% of those new systems and potentially losing data is really a big fear for our constituents that we support and it's hard not to see how these things are related. Right, you have employee frustration, you have loss of data that could set back projects revenue at a time when things are really competitive in the market for all of our customers and the economic pressures as well are just equally incredibly high. Many of those organizations see technology as an unlock to being more productive, more efficient and meeting the demands of all those pressures that I just mentioned. So scaling your tech stack, getting rid of redundant tools, systems that slow us down, is very disruptive, not just to the IT organization, and we feel very uncomfortable in that moment in trying to get the organization to consolidate.
Speaker 1:Well, great binding there. And did the survey highlight any particular apps or tools that are big contributors to tech sprawl, as we call it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, certainly, and I think this is kind of universal across all organizations, right, so I can speak a little bit. I can't speak for all organizations, but hopefully, uh, the audience can, uh can, align here. Um, so it's really around project management tools, right, came up very, very often, as you can imagine, with. Two-thirds of the respondents say that their companies rely on five or more project management tools, which is a lot. 75% said that their organizations are using 10 or more software applications overall. This tracks with other reporting and surveys that we've seen, where teams and projects have specific tools that are recycled over and over again, though they place obvious limits. There's always limits in these tools and collaboration and productivity tools. There was actually a Wall Street Journal article in May that said basically the same thing People like their tools, despite the limits and the costs and complexity of maintaining all of the seats and licensing. So this is definitely a consistency of what we saw across our constituents and that we surveyed.
Speaker 1:Interesting. So in your opinion and from the survey, I mean, how does tech sprawl impact organizations more broadly? You know they've been caught, so there are other consequences that IT leaders should be made aware of.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely. So I think the biggest thing for us from an IT leadership perspective right is we have to take off the IT leaders tech leader hat off, right. We got to be more business leaders and put a different hat on, which is so we can work with the business. It's about change management, helping leaders, teams, employees see the bigger picture. Even though they love their tools, they love their data, they feel comfortable in the benefits of that consolidation, not just from a cost savings perspective, but how it can make everything and everybody more effective and more productive, delivering more value to their customers. And back to the business.
Speaker 2:You can start to see that conversation about consolidation with folks on tech terms. You need to start that conversation with what's important to them, which is the business, their function, the things that they do day to day to them. Which is the business, their function, the things that they do day to day. And maybe, as an example, think of like a sales team trying to come through three to four different disconnected CRMs within the environment and with customer and prospect information lingering across those platforms and data when trying to assess pipeline and deal health and the next steps becomes really complicated. So having a single source of information that makes sense from a sales data and make it a lot easier, faster to review and more trustworthy when looking for clues and details for new sales and unlocking expansion and new customer and new customer prospects. So consolidation brings those disconnect systems into one platform and environment and eliminating all the redundancies and closing those gaps is, uh, is something that you know the sale help achieve those sales goals as well.
Speaker 1:Got it. So I was an employee in enterprise tech for gosh 20 plus years and I was one of those employees that always resisted IT in general. But any consolidation change is hard. How do you deal with employees like me when they're attached to the tools and the processes they sort of know and love?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I mean there's a lot of consequences, right? I mean you just mentioned it, right, you also face the same thing. I face the same thing. I love my tools and just like, kind of how I mentioned, you know, from an IT perspective, we got to take that IT hat off. We got to, you know, be able to put the business hat on, and so I think, from like, some of the consequences of doing that and helping the organization is we have to get them across the line, right? So not only do we know that there's some hard costs to this, but there's also some unknown costs associated to this as well, right?
Speaker 2:So 68 percent of the IT professionals in that survey that I just mentioned spent more than 10 hours per week managing and maintaining software applications running from school, ensuring that information is as accurate, the permissions are set up and up to date. We have security things that we have to be compliant with. So, instead of finding new ways to help their teams and themselves more, being more productive and effective that's 25% of the average work week that that we're constantly just sifting through these applications and supporting it. From an IT perspective, work is less efficient, harder to get done, as you can imagine. They also found integration problems as well. Right, 39% of those were integration problems. There was 31% were security compliance risks as a major challenge associated with app sprawl.
Speaker 2:Right, and those costs and concerns aren't the upfront dollar figures like we would think about. The hard costs like seats and license charges, all of those hidden costs that I just mentioned, such as the future upgrades, maintenance, the time required to implement, the cost of ownership of these tools, the training that is involved, were both called out in the survey, and not just from a tech IT professional perspective, but there's a pain for all of the organization from a tech sprawl perspective. So I think in April we did a survey called Gray Work. There's a bunch of content around that, around our website and within Gray Work. That's really the time and resources wasted looking for information and data that's disconnected around our systems and workflow. It people reported spending 11 hours per week doing nothing but chasing information from system to system, person to person, and again, that's more than a quarter of a regular work week. So there's a lot of time wasted associated to the sprawl and we got to be able to get to a point where the organization understands IT consolidation is a positive, not a negative.
Speaker 1:Yeah, great point, and we're all doing more with less, which means less money, but also less time, that's often overlooked. Let's talk practical strategies, any first steps towards this goal. What say you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, first step and hopefully a lot of people aligned with me on this one. But this one is embracing IT governance. That's got to be the very first one to control the sprawl right. So business and IT leaders can hopefully partner together on a proactive approach in the governance journey that maintains IT standards. Governance journey that maintains IT standards, security requirements. But does it just sacrifice the agility of today's modern software? Or, in other words, approach IT consolidation as an opportunity Again, it's positive Right-size your tech stack while also retaining the customization and flexibility everyone loves.
Speaker 2:The second I just talked about the what. The second is really the how. Right when consolidating. Take a platform approach where critical systems are integrated so that they can share data together more visibly in projects across the company. That's really QuickBase at its core right.
Speaker 2:A workforce or work management platform that combines speed, agility, ease of creating, deploying, you know, really customized AI power solutions with advanced governance and controls to ensure business isn't slowed by security concerns, which, you know, security it's always.
Speaker 2:You know there's a lot of friction there as well, which we can get over with quick bases solution. You have built in product guardrails to help maintain it. Visibility into what's being created, what the systems are integrated and by whom and by what, and building and sharing and deploying is essentially managed by the user's role, by users roles, projects or products and or functional department, while data integration security standards are in place and enforced from a compliance regulation perspective as well. So, cutting out the costs of challenges with these disconnected IT systems and the ecosystem improve the ROI overall of your tech investment which, as you know today, if you're reading any of the media today, there is a significant conversation and surfacing around IT spin and IT consolidation, just not from complexity perspective, but the spins are great and I think IT has less of a burden to manage tech sprawl if we can actually manage these things since it's all in one platform from a QuickBase perspective and the business can keep moving and turning ordinary work into extraordinary impact across the business. Love that.
Speaker 1:And so we're, in the time of the year, planning for 2025. Hard to believe it's upon us. I mean, how do you think of you know, planning software investments? You get everyone coming to you with their pet projects and favorite new point solutions or things they've discovered. Saas apps and, of course you know, counters the whole tech sprawl challenge. What's your philosophy there?
Speaker 2:counters the whole tech sprawl challenge. What's your philosophy there? Yeah, well, by philosophy, we're already in AOP planning as we speak, that annual operating planning. So definitely you know what's top frame of mind right now is just kind of breaking apart some of those habits that we just mentioned holding on to old tools, holding on to old data, that's, disparate bespoke systems, and just changing the mindset across the organization when it comes to software and applications. And so for a long time people would solve one problem at a time by purchasing a point solution and not looking at it as a platform and a holistic solution without thinking about that.
Speaker 2:That one tool that could connect all other teams and projects and and and solutions together, all those, like I said, all those B books, b spoke systems, are how we wind up with the technology and app sprawl of our systems and our software, which then you know, makes our data very complex for our teams who can't get to those resources.
Speaker 2:So again, it's really time to break up the habit. In doing so, change one tool per problem or team approach is something that we have to change the mindset within the organization, look at it from a holistic approach. So this change management that we're kind of talking through is very challenging, but it definitely starting to make more sense and making the case for getting buy-in from your stakeholders, the different functional leaders, and providing more of an ROI of that consolidation and just being and you got to be ready for pushback right. It is the department of no, so we have to be ready for the pushback from our user base and our functions that we do support. So we've got to get them beyond keeping a strong hold of their favorite tool.
Speaker 1:Got it. So let's turn to QuickBase. You're a CIO, of course. You're sort of drinking your own champagne in a way. So maybe we haven't talked QuickBase much, but how do you help companies manage, streamline their tech systems? Give us this sort of elevator pitch, if you would right back to these point systems.
Speaker 2:Right Point systems are very limited in their capabilities. You could have, for instance, speaking of drinking our own champagne in project management. We do portfolio management internally right.
Speaker 2:We have the point systems and I won't name names, but we have point systems within our organization that are part of our CRM and part of our ticketing system and being able to ingest work that comes from the business, whether that's planned work or that's ad hoc work from a request perspective. These things are all disjointed together and there's no clean integration path to understand what is your capacity around the organization, what are the top priorities from a portfolio perspective, what functions are actually involved and resources involved to execute on that item? That's from a portfolio perspective. And then also talking about sprawl, we have project sprawl, right. People spin up projects and then you're utilizing your capacity for other projects that aren't part of the priority list on your portfolio management stack. So what we've done is we actually wanted to see all of the different pieces where capacity is being utilized across the business and get that into one platform so that we can say you know we're spending 80% of our capacity on portfolio work and then where does the other 20% and in some cases it's maybe 40% is going to portfolio work and you have 60% that's going to stuff that's not that important, right?
Speaker 2:So for us to be able to aggregate that data up, we have to be able to utilize a QuickBase app that we customize internally to ingest all of that information and be able to make decisions based off of what our application is telling us and being able to operate in that realm as well, so that we're not in three or four different applications. So that's one way that we're using it internally and that's very similar to what we're doing with our customers as well. Understanding number one what is their problem? Understanding their process flow between these bespoke systems and multiple functions involved as well, with multiple data points coming in, and being able to provide a quick-based solution. And sometimes that also means, from a consolidation perspective that we have, we probably can cut back on 50% of the previous solution stack, um, of what was providing, uh, the services to the business. We can say we can get rid of 50% of the stack by introducing one single tool, which is QuickBase.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's a mic drop, Pretty impressive. I guess, in summary, you know any other advice you'd give to your peer CIOs, IT leaders, as they're heading into planning season. You know whether it's tech sprawl or other words of wisdom.
Speaker 2:Yeah, other words of wisdom. Again, we're kind of in a. I think we're all feeling the same pressure from the business to to decomplexify our environments and has some outcome of that is reducing the tech, the tech spend, and I think you know it comes back to governance. You know how did we get to a place where the environment became complex, we had tech sprawl, and so this is where we have to partner stronger with our functional leaders, who we support and understand their challenges, which then overlap with other functions, and then what are the common systems in the middle that we can consolidate and bring more value, more efficiency into the business? So, if I was to break it down, it's stakeholdering number one, it governance is number two, and I think between those two things you have a strong partnership to go execute and bring more ROI to the business.
Speaker 1:Wow, wonderful advice. What great insights. Thanks so much for joining and sharing your wisdom. Now back to the grind and love to circle back in the new year and see how you're progressing.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Any more feedback you're getting from customers in the real world. Thanks everyone for listening and watching. Check out Quick Space on social. They put out some amazing, really educational content, kind of like this one that's worth checking out. Take care, All right, Take care.