Why Technology Fails Without People | Michael Saitow Explains AI, Innovation & Success

Technology leadership insights #technologyleadership #peoplefirsttech #biotechinsights

In this episode, Michael Saitow explains why technology success begins with people and clear goals. Please visit our website to get more information: https://swangroup.net/ 

Many companies pick tools before defining what they want to build and why. They focus on automation and AI without aligning teams around a shared destination. Michael highlights common issues in biotech and manufacturing where misalignment across leadership stops progress. 

The conversation explains how leaders should define purpose before choosing software or AI solutions. You will learn why people and process matter more than tools alone, how to align cross-functional teams, and why organizational culture drives innovation.

Specifically, this episode highlights the following themes:

• How misalignment across leadership teams quietly derails technology initiatives
• Why defining the “why” matters more than choosing the tool
• The evolution from automation and machine learning to today’s AI umbrella

Links from this episode:

• Get to know more about Steven Swan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/swangroup 
• Get to know more about Michael Saitow: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-saitow 
• Learn more about Saitow Consulting: https://www.saitowconsulting.com

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-swan-group/ 

Website:  https://swangroup.net/   

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#technologyleadership #peoplefirsttech #biotechinsights #leadershipstrategy #aiadoptionadvice #teamalignment

Transcript

Steve Swan [00:00:00]:
Next on Biotech Bytes, join me for a great conversation with Michael Saitow regarding people and technology and how really what we need to do is think about where we're heading and what we're doing and why we're doing it. Join me next. Welcome to Biotech Bytes, where we speak with IT leaders in the biotech industry. I'm your host, Steve Swan, and today we have the pleasure of speaking with Michael Saitow. Michael is the owner and founder of Saitow Consulting, and he has some great ideas and some great things to say. So I'm really excited for this conversation. Michael, thank you. Thanks for joining us.

Michael Saitow [00:00:37]:
I appreciate being here, Steve.

Steve Swan [00:00:38]:
Welcome. And I want to remind our listeners, if you, even if you don't enjoy what you see today, you know, like us on either Apple or Spotify and subscribe to us and check out the rest of our podcast. So, Michael, welcome. So what, what I always like to do at the beginning of the podcast to give our viewers/listeners a little perspective is ask our guests to give, you know, a couple-minute introduction on who they are and how they got to where they are. So would you mind giving us a quick, quick download on you?

Michael Saitow [00:01:10]:
Sure. So my name is Michael Saitow. I am the founder of Saitow Consulting, and I have a pretty long career in technology, specifically around food and beverage. And developed a 25-year career at a company called MS Walker. We were a wine and spirits manufacturer and distributor. And during that time, I was fortunate enough to have 15-ish years of advisory services with adjacent companies that were, were either in our supply chain on the manufacturing, on the motor control side, or in complementary industries, seafood, coffee, just other folks that had highly regulated food and beverage supply chains.

Steve Swan [00:02:00]:
Nice. And so with, you know, 'cause a lot of our listeners are from biotech, you know, pharma, have you spent a lot of time there and, and did you continue with the, you know, I guess sort of the enterprise systems, the supply chains, or have you, have you expanded into different areas within that sector?

Michael Saitow [00:02:19]:
So I've done a little bit of biotech, um, in so far as the, um, a good friend was a PE guy that bought an mRNA testing company out of bankruptcy post-COVID. So they got too far over their skis and he was like, can you go figure this out? And I said, sure. Uh, spent about 6 months working on that project and helping them, reassemble the ship. And I think the thing that I learned about medical testing and biotech is that the problems that are, that people think are unique to biotech are not. The problems that people think are unique to food and beverage are not. You know, it always comes down to good leadership. And it used to be the three-part triangle of people, process, technology. And I think that's evolved into a quadrilateral of people, process, technology, and data.

Michael Saitow [00:03:14]:
And I don't think that anybody ever gets away from that. And so in my experiences with that biotech company, it begat another one and it was sort of the same process of folks in the organization not being aligned around what is it that we're trying to do? What do we do here? How do we solve whatever problem we solve? And then how do we put the people, the process, the technology, and the data in line to get to that common goal.

Steve Swan [00:03:46]:
It's amazing how quick you can boil it down, but it's also amazing how quick folks can, like you said, get out over the front of their skis and get all scrambled on those things. You know, if you keep them aligned, right? And you keep them, you know, in front of you, looking through the, the, the, the windshield and keeping those things in front of you and trying to tackle them, it, you can pull it together. But some folks get lost in, in one of those, what you call quadrangles, right? Yeah. You focus too much on the, on the data, too much on the technology. You know, it's, it's, it's about all those, right? It's about putting all that together as, as a puzzle.

Michael Saitow [00:04:25]:
I think the common thing that I've seen over decades in the late 2000s, we needed to, um, have a website. In the late 2010s, we needed to move to the cloud. Now we have to move to AI. And I think the commonality between, behind all of those things is somebody is deciding on a tool rather than deciding on what it is they need to build. And so, you know, if all, if you are a hammer, then the world is a nail. And if you don't understand why you need a website or what websites mean, or if you don't understand why you're going to move to the cloud or what you're going to move to the cloud or how you're going to move to the cloud what the user experience is like, then you missed the boat. And similarly with all of the, a lot of the AI initiatives that I'm seeing, it's if you don't understand what you're trying to do with AI, then you're not really going to be successful doing anything with AI. Everyone has to be aligned with this is our project, this is why we're doing it, and this is what we hope to get out of it.

Michael Saitow [00:05:27]:
And so there's an exercise that I've done both in food and beverage and with these two little biotech startups. Or rebirths was just, does everybody know what good looks like? And it's not about performance at the employee level. It's not about a KPI for system uptime. It's, does everybody know what good looks like? And I have found that there are some common things around financial literacy. There are some common things around operational literacy that folks who aren't in the general business realm don't understand. And so, you know, finance is always famous for, well, we gave you the budget, we gave you the report, we gave you— well, just because you handed it to them doesn't mean that they read it and doesn't mean that they understood it and doesn't mean that it changed their behavior. And so I don't think that those problems are unique to biotech.

Steve Swan [00:06:23]:
I agree 100%. You know, I think that, you know, like you said, I mean, I frame it a different way, but with the same, You know, we got to know the destination before we know what roads we're going to take to get there.

Michael Saitow [00:06:34]:
Absolutely. I like that. I might steal that from you.

Steve Swan [00:06:36]:
You steal it. It's yours. You can have it. Yeah. It's just, you know, I do that when I, when I get somebody ready for an interview, you know, I really, I have them sit down with the, whoever the stakeholders are and everybody's a stakeholder that interviews you. Right. And I ask them goals and priorities in the first 6 to 12 months. And when someone answers that question, they're going to kind of give you almost their destination, where they want to go, what they need, what they need out of this role.

Steve Swan [00:06:58]:
And that helps the person frame. Their conversation with them because you only get 30 to 60. 60 is a long time, 30 short, right? So 45 minutes with somebody and you've got to, uh, uh, give them, you know, what they're looking for. It's, I always make the analogy that it's like calling your friend and telling them you're sitting in their driveway and they say, well, you never called me for the directions, you know? Well, I'm in a random driveway in Rhode Island. Well, I'm, that's not mine. It's someone else's, right? So it's the same sort of thing.

Michael Saitow [00:07:25]:
It's funny that you say that about the interview process because in some of the fractional gigs that I've taken, I'll sit down and interview top-down, bottom-up. What, where do we want to be? What do you think our biggest problems are? Like, you know, just sort of the, some, I guess I would call them generic consultant questions. What are we good at? What are we bad at? Why is our competitor better than this? What are the last 5 proposals that we've won? And more importantly, what are the last 5 proposals that we've lost? Right? That kind of stuff. And the interesting part is when you ask those questions and you get fundamentally different answers from C-suite to a director seat down to a shop floor employee or a guy working in the lab, right? And then the first 30 or 60 days just becomes around alignment, right? How do you take what you've heard, prepare it to say, here are the gaps in what I'm hearing, and here's why we're not hitting our goals of 'cause people are working on what they think to be is the right thing, but it may not be what's best for the company. And then trying to parrot that back so that everybody can say, here's what good looks like. And that's usually the first somewhere between 60 and 120 days of most of the fractional things. And I've found that once you can define the problem and once everybody agrees on the problem definition, then that's 90% of the hard work. Because like everybody understands, oh, if, if that's what we're doing wrong, we, we know how to fix that.

Michael Saitow [00:08:56]:
But we didn't all agree that that's what we were doing wrong.

Steve Swan [00:08:59]:
That's gotta be impossible to do as a fractional outsider with no real authority, right? I mean, you're, you're, you're influencing, uh, uh, and building consensus or however you wanna frame it without them seeing you as a true team member. I mean, that's gotta be—

Michael Saitow [00:09:17]:
it comes down to storytelling and it comes down to being persuasive. So I ran into an instance where a freight manager was buying freight based on the best cost per case landed, and a warehouse manager was measured based on the dock-to-stock time. And so The freight manager would say, well, look, if I overload the containers and I floor stack everything, I can get my cost per case down about 25 cents. And they didn't know that it took the warehouse guys 8 hours to unload that container as opposed to 20 minutes to unload something that's on pallets. And so because you had these different business units that had different goals and objectives, and different ways that it got tied back to their comp and how they were measured as an overall, you know, part of the contributor of the organization. They weren't talking to one another. And so you bring both of them into the same room and say, guys, here's our problem. How do we meet in the middle? Well, then sometimes you have to go back to finance or leadership and say, look, we need to restructure comp.

Michael Saitow [00:10:34]:
Which is always a really hard thing to say. But if the two people who are getting restructured understand why and agree on, look, if I help you, you help me, and we can all win together and we change what we're measured by, then changing the comp becomes easy and they can sell it to leadership. And I'm not, I'm just there to sit there and ask a lot of questions and then parrot back some answers and help them tell their story.

Steve Swan [00:11:00]:
What you just, your example is fundamentally what I run into every day, right? Because when they look at, you know, we're gonna, we're, we're gonna bring on the Swan Group to find our executive, our CIO, whatever, whatever it is. Um, and they look at the fee, they look at the number, but that's it, right? They don't look at, okay, how much time is he gonna save? How much time are we spending with our, with our leaders doing these interviews that are, are with the wrong people?

Michael Saitow [00:11:23]:
What's the cost of a bad hire?

Steve Swan [00:11:24]:
What's the co— that go all the way to that. The cost of a bad hire. We gotta do this again. None of that's factored in. It's just, they look at the fee and that stands alone. There's no, nothing around it. They don't look at the back end of that, you know? So it's the same thing, you know, it's the same thing. I had a kid come to me.

Steve Swan [00:11:38]:
I call him a kid. He was probably close to 30, but he still, we were talking about, we were talking about AI and he said to me, he said, Steve, you know, in his deep voice, he said, you know, Steve, people keep telling me, and he's, he, he deals with IT around the manufacturing area. And he said, people keep telling me AI is coming for my, my role. And this is going back to exactly what everything we were just talking about. He goes, it's not. I go, well, what do you mean, Ben? He said, until we know and we all agree upon the question and the ask and the goal that we're looking for out of AI, I, I'm, I still have a job. He said, AI and the technology is the easy part.

Michael Saitow [00:12:18]:
Yeah.

Steve Swan [00:12:18]:
It's getting everybody aligned on, on, on what we're going to ask and what the, what driveway we're going to land in or looking to land in. Until then, I've got a job. AI needs to know exactly what driveway you're going to, and it'll get you there faster than me. But I spend 90% of my time rejigging what they think they want into what they really need and the solutions that we can provide.

Michael Saitow [00:12:42]:
You know, we were in, um, we're in this lab and, uh, looking around. You know, small company, and every piece of equipment has a clipboard on it. And I'm like, what is— what? Tell me, talk to me. Oh, well, it's required for auditing purposes. Okay, talk to the tech. How often do you do it? Every hour, there's egg time, or every hour I got to go record this. I say to the CEO, like, you know, they make tools for that, right? And he's like, yeah, the tools don't work. Okay.

Michael Saitow [00:13:18]:
What do you mean the tools don't work? He said, well, they're not compliant with whatever standard we have in whatever part of Texas we were in. I'm like, you think that Texas has a different standard than either HHS or FDA or whatever umbrella you think you're responding to? And he is like, Well, well, that's what they told me. Well, who's they? The people that sell the equipment. So the people that sell the equipment told you that they didn't want you to automatically monitor the equipment cuz they want techs that are their trained techs that they can put through their training program and charge you for their training to monitor the equipment. Like, this is, you, you effectively have a smart home here.. And if you think about it like your smart home or you think about it like your Tesla and you think about all the data that you could be extracting from it, we could do that. Yeah, we, we can do that, right? And so a lot of it is just getting people outside of this confirmation bias or rumor or something that they think they heard. And I used to just call it curiosity, but I have since learned it's called first principles thinking where you strip away everything that you, think you know or everything you assume, and you boil everything down to the first question, what are we trying to do? We have to provide monitoring and reporting at an audibility perspective for this equipment.

Michael Saitow [00:14:48]:
And that first principle thinking applies to your guy with AI, applies to my freight people, applies to my lab people, applies to everywhere that you go. It's just strip everything down to the barest component and start to rebuild with knowledge and collective knowledge so you're not doing it in a vacuum.

Steve Swan [00:15:08]:
Well, the, the great thing about when you walk into a company is they've already, how do I wanna phrase this, admitted that there's some level of some issue of some problem. So they need you to help them work on their batting stance or their, you know, so that they can hit the ball better. So they've already said, okay, we, we, we need a coach. We need to, we need help, right? So we gotta go out. Michael could be our guy.

Michael Saitow [00:15:34]:
There's a total sweet spot that I've seen though, and it's, you know, you're not dealing with, uh, pre-seed, you're not dealing with ideation type companies, and you're not dealing with, um, you know, 2,500 seats or more. You're deal— because they have a lot of the times they have the bureaucracy, which encompasses policing behavior. It's that 25 people to 2,500 people or 25 people to 500 people where you're moving out of being a pirate, just sort of roaming around. This is a Steve Jobs quote where you're moving around of being a pirate, roaming around the sea and doing whatever you want. And now you've got a navy and now you've got an armada of ships that you got to keep organized and aligned. And those take very different skills. And it's oftentimes the leadership team where the CEO starts doing everything and then adds to his team and adds a set of complimentary skills, but not necessarily competitive skills, right? So it's wanting to build the echo chamber to get to critical mass and then needing to break the echo chamber because you've achieved critical mass, but you can't get through that next whatever growth milestone or product development or sales cycle or whatever it is.

Steve Swan [00:16:54]:
You know, and everybody just getting in their own way, you know? Now, you mentioned data earlier, right? And, you know, a lot of the folks that I talk to here on Biotech Bytes, you know, everybody's talking about AI, right? And everybody talks about data, you know, and it's the fuel, right? It's the fuel for AI.

Michael Saitow [00:17:12]:
It is. It's the currency.

Steve Swan [00:17:14]:
It is. And that's why I see a lot of the PE firms and such getting involved with it as much as they can, because they know it's the petroleum of our generation, quite frankly.

Michael Saitow [00:17:22]:
Absolutely.

Steve Swan [00:17:24]:
Absolutely. You know, tell me, you know, I don't know, tell me where you've seen that or tell me where you've seen, you know, as far as data and AI is concerned. I mean, is that, do you think that that is as much centered around the people? Because we've been talking a lot about the people, right? We've been talking a lot about Um, you know, the individuals and what they see as the quote unquote the problem and such. I, I'm wondering how you wrap, I guess if, how do you wrap somebody's head around, hey, you really gotta get your data right or else this isn't gonna work for you. Cause they could be like, no, man, our data's great. I mean, we keep on top of that. We hit that checkbook. We hit that, that clipboard once an hour.

Steve Swan [00:17:57]:
I mean, we got our data.

Michael Saitow [00:17:59]:
There, there's two ways that I've seen that work. And one is, um, through failure, right? You've gotta get something wrong. You've gotta have egg on your face. You've gotta be like, what did we mess up? Or you're bringing in people that are data first and can't understand why things keep going sideways. And so they're peeling back, again, first principles thinking. I've been in manufacturing companies where you build a new plant, you build a totally automated plant, and I worked for a company that we went from fully manual to fully automated, and you could make your product via an iPad at a certain point. And what we failed to realize was our maintenance staff had went from, I have to walk around the floor and I have to listen to things, to I now have all of this data that I need to be able to separate the noise from the signal., and then I need to be able to predict when that signal is going to be meaningful, right? And so whether you're, um, an example would be you're list— you have listening devices on your motors in a, in a, um, a chem lab, right? And so as the machines are running, if the frequency of the machine changes, you know that it needs preventative maintenance long before the performance of the machine demonstrates that it needs preventative maintenance. And so then you just have to tune your CMMS system, your maintenance systems, to be able to listen for that frequency and then signal that's what you need.

Michael Saitow [00:19:45]:
And so I think that's a place that data comes into play is in IoT, in, or IIoT, And then the second part that of data is sort of the interoperability of data. So Palantir does a really good job of taking disconnected systems, bringing all of the data together, normalizing the data, and then presenting you with what you need to do. They are what for decades, you know, Microsofts and Oracles and all of those folks tried to do with building a data lake. I think it was at the meeting that we met, One of our colleagues had a quote that, you know, have a data lake and not a data swamp. Right. Right. I like that. I like that.

Michael Saitow [00:20:30]:
And it stuck with me because so often, you know, I bought a company and they had an alphanumeric item number and we had a numeric item number and now we have to go back and either change whatever host database we're going to live in or figure out a way to blend the data together. And that's like the most simple type of example. Where, you know, it happened in Y2K, right? Everybody— and, and so it always just comes back to the foundation of data that the people, process, and technology sit on top of. Yeah.

Steve Swan [00:21:05]:
Well, yeah, we have to, we have to handle that. We have to deal with that. And it's— but there's so much of that unstructured data, a lot of stuff what you're talking about there that they've gotta, they've gotta figure out what's meaningful and what's not, right? I've had lots of CIOs tell me that, you know, all the data that they see and all the data that they have, some of it makes sense, some of it doesn't. Others want to use more. You know, I had one CIO tell me, you know, on the EMR and EHR data, the electronic medical record, he's like, we should be squeezing more out of that for our adverse events, for our drugs, and so on and so forth. And that's not something that a lot of folks have been moving towards. So, there's just, there's so much to tackle and there's so much to do.

Michael Saitow [00:21:49]:
But I think that those are good, you know, use cases for AI, right? So let me describe in natural language what the metadata looks like in system A, let me describe in natural language what the metadata looks like in system B, and let me ask the AI engine to be able to help me relate the data, right? Great use case.

Steve Swan [00:22:14]:
Sure.

Michael Saitow [00:22:15]:
Yeah. Yeah. However, however, there, the, the, the consequence of that use case, Steve, is if you're doing EHR data, right? Are you do, who owns the data? What tenant are you in? Are you doing RAG? Like, what are the, what are the guardrails that data scientists need to understand specifically around PHI or, or EHR, MHR? What are the guardrails that people need to understand when they start playing in some of these public models versus private models?

Steve Swan [00:22:44]:
Yeah, you just made my brain go in like 12 different directions with all that. I mean, no, seriously, because what's, you know, the governance around that, the security around that, what can they see, what can they not see? You know, because there's HIPAA. I mean, there's so many different things on there, you know? You know, like one of those movies where everything's just—

Michael Saitow [00:23:06]:
I don't even work orange at a certain point where you're just watching the film going, oh my God, yeah, I can't take all of this in anymore.

Steve Swan [00:23:12]:
Because there was a lot of that, those, those folks when they see all that data or handle all that data, what's— what does it mean? There's so many different groups that are involved with that. And, and then there's one person at the middle processing it or doing something with it, right?

Michael Saitow [00:23:25]:
So I, I've— there was a case where a very well-known consumer electronics company had a keynote and they brought an intern. This marketing intern got invited to the keynote in a way that, you know, he was hitting way above his weight in this room. And he said, you know, I'm gonna impress my boss. And he took his phone and he put it on the table and he recorded the entire keynote and he took the recording and he uploaded it to one of the LLMs. And produced this beautiful summary, action items, tasks, like beautiful. Kid hands it in, it's like, hey, look what I did. I used blank to do my, to help me with my homework. Like didn't try to take credit for it 'cause it was way above what he could have produced by his own.

Michael Saitow [00:24:14]:
And everybody was like high-fiving him and patting him on the back. And it was like the, that line from Alice's Restaurant where they're like, on the Group W bench and everybody's celebrating it, not really realizing the consequences of being on the Group W bench. And a couple weeks later, one of the competitors of this consumer electronics company found the entire product roadmap by just using that large language model as a search engine. And Company A sues Company B, both companies wind up suing the, the LLM., and the LLM's like, look, this kid, he signed your rights away. If he didn't have permission to sign your rights away, that's a you problem, not a me problem. So Company B got Company A's roadmap and Company A now needed to pivot. The LLM was found, you know, had no, um, no guilt, no compli— no, no wrongdoing in the issue. And for those of us that watch what happens in this space, it was a telltale of why you need to be careful and why terms and conditions matter and sort of, you know, yeah.

Steve Swan [00:25:26]:
I had one of my very first podcasts was with a CIO that I've known. I actually placed him at the company he's at now. And he was telling me about, you know, this was early on. This was 2 years ago, right? 2 and a half years ago. And he was talking about, you know, do we use, um, you know, ChatGPT? Do we use some of these AI things at the office? Everybody was still trying to figure that out. And his belief was, listen, if, if I don't let them use it at the office, then they're going to have, you know, a machine over here that they're going to be using it. So while they're figuring that out and while they're doing that at the, at the highest level in the company, he and one of his internal employees is playing with ChatGPT. And they put in some information, up popped, this is Biotech Nightmare 101 at the top of the list.

Steve Swan [00:26:16]:
Up popped the formulary data from a competitor. Yeah, Michael, you hear where I'm going here? Yeah. So he, he didn't even want to talk. He, he, the way he was talking to me about it was almost like he felt like he had to take a shower after seeing it. You know what I mean? So he, he, he, he did screenshots of everything and sent it over to the CIO of the competitor because he, you know, a lot of these folks know each other.

Michael Saitow [00:26:39]:
They know each other.

Steve Swan [00:26:40]:
Exactly. It's a small world. He's like, you got an issue, you know, and they drilled it down to a consultant that it doesn't matter who they drilled it down to, to your point, it's out there. And so, uh, yeah, that, that didn't, and you can never put it back. You're not putting that toothpaste back in the tube. That's gone. That's out. You could do whatever you want, but I mean, I can, from personal experience, I know I had a, I had a guy that I used to coach teams with, kids, kids teams with.

Steve Swan [00:27:07]:
He worked for the DEA and his wife worked for the FBI. And league that I worked for, the person that ran the league published their address, their phone numbers, their email and everything. And these, these two flew under the radar, especially the FBI, his wife, FBI, she transports bad guys. Okay. So he freaked out. They got in touch with everybody. The government got in touch with Google and they, they, we can't get rid of that.

Michael Saitow [00:27:34]:
That's out there now. Nope.

Steve Swan [00:27:35]:
You know, it's out there. It's, and so if they can't get rid of it, nobody's getting rid of this stuff.

Michael Saitow [00:27:40]:
You know? So, you know, one of the things that I want to pivot to, if we can, yeah. Is, um, why, uh, shameless self-promotion, but why I think fractional makes sense. And so all of the things that we're talking about, right? If you are, if you are a fractional person, CIO, CTO, CEO, whatever, it doesn't really matter. You see, you have a much broader exposure to the problems that companies are running into and your ability to help support them is accelerated. And so what I have found in just sort of a lot of the organic conversations that I have it's, oh, well, what should we do somewhere? And, you know, there's, like you said, the CIO at Company A knows the CIO at Company B. When I was a CIO, like, I knew who my competitors were. We would have lunch every, you know, every couple of months and just sort of sit down and you compare war stories. Oftentimes we're using the same vendors, oftentimes we're using the same software.

Michael Saitow [00:28:46]:
And so, hey, what'd you pay per seat here? How did you negotiate with that guy?, you know, are you having this problem? You know, can, can we get the 8 of us that are in this segment to do customer advisory board work so that we can steer their product roadmap to serve our needs? Like normal stuff, right? And the, so in the fractional space, I've seen something similar. And the, one of the mistakes that I've talked to people about is fractional people getting too hands-on. And so the, there's a, a thing that I like to do, which is I'll get read-only access to whatever system is gonna be in scope. But if I'm doing read-write, then I'm doing you a disservice. Why are you doing me a disservice? So the disservice comes at, if I'm not upskilling your team, then I'm preventing them from learning. Got it. The, the thought process that I have developed over a lifetime in this industry. Right.

Michael Saitow [00:29:49]:
And so if I go in and, you know, whether it's a firewall configuration or a VPN configuration, whatever, like, yes, can I fix it? Sure. But if I go fix it, then your IT guy isn't learning, like, the mistake that they made, or, um, it's not helping you when I'm out the door. Yeah, correct. Right. And so The goal is to be able to shoulder surf and teach rather than, you know, 2:00 AM at a keyboard banging away at it and doing, and you might do the 2:00 AM time to see what you need to change. Sure. But just don't go change it.

Steve Swan [00:30:25]:
Right, right, right. Agreed.

Michael Saitow [00:30:26]:
Yeah.

Steve Swan [00:30:26]:
And you know, you read a lot about that, even, even for a leader, a manager of a team, you know, you don't want to be the center point that everything's gotta flow through either, right? You, you want correct everybody to learn. I mean, I would do that. All day long with my kids, right? You know, I'll never forget, I'm driving with my daughter who's, she's 23 now. We're driving down the road. I'm in the passenger seat, you know, because at a certain point when they're in, when they have their permit, right, you can't, you know, whatever, they can't drive on their own. So she's the worst with directions. She relies on her technology. She sits there and stares at her phone the whole time, right, for her.

Steve Swan [00:31:01]:
Okay. To Walmart from her house, which is 5 miles, you know. So we're literally driving to Walmart one time there when she, she's So she's sitting at a red light. She goes, Dad, left or right? I just sat there. Dad, left or right? I sat there. She asked a third time, the light changes and she went the wrong way.

Michael Saitow [00:31:20]:
Yeah.

Steve Swan [00:31:20]:
She's screaming at me. I mean, howling at me. I said, after she was done, I go, you'll never make that mistake again.

Michael Saitow [00:31:26]:
I promise.

Steve Swan [00:31:26]:
And I don't have to be in the car.

Michael Saitow [00:31:28]:
She, she's got to let them fail. Yeah. She looked at whether they're kids or employees or clients or Exactly.

Steve Swan [00:31:34]:
I love that, Steve. Yeah. Cause otherwise if I just said, yeah, go left. So next time she's at the light, she'll be like, I don't remember. Which way do I go? Cause I didn't engage. I don't, I didn't, my brain wasn't there, but now she's had such high emotions on it. You know, she, she was going to know. So anyway, yeah, same, same, same sort of thing.

Steve Swan [00:31:51]:
And as you've noticed, I like to boil things down to real easy, simple terms. And that's one of them, you know?

Michael Saitow [00:31:59]:
Absolutely.

Steve Swan [00:31:59]:
Yeah. So now, well, let me ask you a question. So, you know, we talked a lot about the people. Um, and, and that's really what it comes down to, right? In, in IT, everybody wants to talk about the technology. Um, and on, on my podcast, you know, you just hit on vendors, right? So I would tell you that the top 3 things that the CIOs want to talk about is AI, security, which nobody can talk about. And then, um, you know, vendors and vendor selection, which nobody talks about because that's not fun and sexy anyway. So it's all come down to AI or a lot of it for a lot of these folks. And I've tried really hard to find even folks at say a Microsoft or whatever that would want to talk about security.

Steve Swan [00:32:34]:
So if anybody wants to come talk about security, love to hear it. Because that's what a lot of folks want to hear. They want to talk about it, right?

Michael Saitow [00:32:42]:
Cybersecurity. These companies that are outsourcing their complicated security issues become totally dependent and, you know, concept of the vendor-managed supply chain and, um, the V-BOM or the S-BOM, like, no, no, no, the vendor bill of materials or the, or the software bill of materials, like what's going in to fill in the blank of cybersecurity or switching engineer or whatever that causes one of these major outages. Those types of things are going to happen and you can either control your destiny and own the headache, but in owning the headache, you limit your ability to solve that headache at a 1,000-person scale. Whereas some of the MSP or MSSPs that are doing it, you know, if when I was a CIO responsible for cyber, we saw 50,000 to 70,000 penetration attempts a day. Right? Small scale. When you think about Comcast that sees $36 billion a month, right? Like, at a certain point, as much as we might say we hate the cable companies, they see it at such a broader scale that they have to be better than one person defending themselves.

Steve Swan [00:34:04]:
So we spend this money.

Michael Saitow [00:34:06]:
Yep.

Steve Swan [00:34:07]:
Maybe we're saving money, right? To get these MSSPs or whatever, these large organizations to do some of this stuff externally, but then we have these outages and we're exposing ourselves to that. So do we, are we doing ourselves a disservice by relying too much on these external vendors or whatever?

Michael Saitow [00:34:25]:
What's your thought there? I don't know. I don't know. I think the MSSP is a tool and you don't start with a tool. You start with what is it we're trying to build. Right? Okay. I wouldn't let an MSSP, I wouldn't, I don't think that the MSSPs are mature enough to drive my car because every once in a while they have a blue screen of death and my car crashes, like not okay. And, but do I think that they're good enough to do navigation? Absolutely. Yeah.

Michael Saitow [00:34:54]:
If the map craps out, then I can still get to where I'm going. And so it really, I guess you can't, sorry. It, it, it really comes down to what is the problem that you're trying to solve and what is your risk tolerance? And what does mastery in that risk area cost, right? If, if the mastery is cost prohibitive, I might need to lower my standards and 5 nines might be too expensive to get to at this scale in my company.

Steve Swan [00:35:24]:
2 nines might be okay, right? Well, and that's, that's anything, right? I mean, totally, totally. You're the head of cyber, right? Uh, if I spend this, we're gonna be totally locked down, but that's a lot of money. The more we bring this down, the more at risk we are. So we gotta figure all that out with everything.

Michael Saitow [00:35:41]:
Absolutely.

Steve Swan [00:35:42]:
With everything, right?

Michael Saitow [00:35:43]:
Everything. Yeah. Yeah. So, and then the, the, the job of the leadership team is to balance everyone's priorities. You know, CEO is looking with binoculars on the horizon. COO is looking with microscope on the inside. CFO is helping to figure out how much gas is left in the tank. You know, CRO is figuring out where the next gas station is.

Michael Saitow [00:36:02]:
Right. And so all of those to just to follow on your daughter's, I can't navigate. Analogy, right? So watch this. Balancing all of those priorities is the job of a, of a, you know, well-oiled leadership team. And then every once in a while when the kids aren't getting together, then, you know, the CEO makes a decision.

Steve Swan [00:36:24]:
So now, okay, watch this. Take that whole landscape you just painted, right? Yep. Where's the fractional guy come in? Let's, I mean, are you going to come in and help Uh, um, everybody redirect what they're thinking, help them figure out what they're thinking, or help them figure out their priorities.

Michael Saitow [00:36:42]:
I mean, where, where, what are we, where are we? You sit, you sit in the room as an objective third party and you sit in the room and you listen and then you ask a lot of questions, right? And so the, where do you come in? Some days you might come in on the side of revenue, so like, I've sort of learned in my, or I guess learned slash developed this philosophy that every business decision comes down to one of 5 things, right? And if you can identify which lever you're pulling, it makes it easier to be transparent around my motives. It makes it easier to figure out like, is this lever more important than you pulling that lever? And it's growing revenue. Reducing cost, increasing compliance, marketing and, and sort of goodwill, or because the boss said so, right? Like every decision that you've ever seen happen in a company can come down to one of those 5 things. And just underst— like a lot of what I do is build that framework of, okay, why are we doing this? What is the driver behind doing this? Sometimes it's, why am I here? I'm here to help you guys understand that you, you can't articulate the why. And if you don't know the why you're doing something, then you kind of miss the boat. Everybody can sit there and bang away on a keyboard all day, every day, or drive a forklift or operate a pipette. But if you can't understand why you're doing that and what is, what does your cog in the larger company machine and what does the problem that the company machine solve? If you can't do that, then you're kind of missing the boat and it's just a job and it's just a paycheck and you're not really passionate about the why.

Steve Swan [00:38:30]:
And each one of those groups, like you said, the finance group, whatever, all those different groups to them, like you said earlier, they own a hammer. So every problem for them is a nail. It's the same problem, right?

Michael Saitow [00:38:42]:
Yep.

Steve Swan [00:38:42]:
But you've got, you gotta be a carpenter, 5 hammers, right?

Michael Saitow [00:38:45]:
Yeah. Yeah, a whole toolbox that you can talk to each one of them about, you know, and you, you go down, you go down. I use a lot of building analogies. You go down the Home Depot aisle, right? There's 72 different types of hammers. There's a reason that every one of those hammers exists, whether it's a roofing hammer or craftsman hammer or whatever. There's a reason for every one of those, but know what that tool is designed for, know why you're reaching for it, and make sure you pick up the right tool. And the way that you know that you're picking up the right tool is because you know what you're trying to build. If you hire an architect to build you a house or you hire a solution architect to build you a software solution, ERP integration or whatever, well, a house to you might be a 3-bedroom ranch with 4 bathrooms and a beautiful sprawling backyard.

Michael Saitow [00:39:30]:
A house to me might be a 3-story where I can, you know, a 3-family that's 3 stories. They mean different things.

Steve Swan [00:39:37]:
And unless you don't— in the middle of the city or something, right?

Michael Saitow [00:39:42]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Swan [00:39:42]:
Exactly. I had a company come to me. I'm going to say, was it a year? Almost a year and a half ago. Not quite. They said, uh, well-funded, doing well, a couple of products on the market, da da da da da. Um, CIO, you know, Steve, I need you to start thinking about something. What's that? I need a head of AI.

Michael Saitow [00:40:03]:
Cool.

Steve Swan [00:40:04]:
Um, what do we, uh, basically what are we solving for?

Michael Saitow [00:40:06]:
What do we need?

Steve Swan [00:40:07]:
What are you looking for? What do you need? Well, I just don't want to miss out. I feel like we're falling behind, you know? So I was like, okay, I didn't say this, but that's a FOMO trade, you know?

Michael Saitow [00:40:19]:
Um, and I didn't know.

Steve Swan [00:40:20]:
Yeah, but it doesn't have to be. I know it doesn't.

Michael Saitow [00:40:23]:
I know. But here's what happened. If you deliberately hire for, I just need somebody to help me figure out where to be, that's okay too, as long as you're transparent around that.

Steve Swan [00:40:35]:
They weren't. Here's what happened. They hired the guy. I got, I didn't get involved. I said, in 3 months with that kind of mindset, in my opinion, it's going to fall off the rails. So I know who they hired. I know the company and I've gotten calls from both sides. This isn't working.

Steve Swan [00:40:53]:
So, you know, the, the, the, the guy's building this great AI stuff, showing it to the, I'm trying to hold workshops. No one's showing up. And his thought process is, listen, IT, if you don't think AI is coming for your job, it is, you know, that kind of thing. But what the company wants is him to, uh, integrate AI into what they have as opposed to building brand new standalone kick-ass stuff. So he wants to innovate and create and they want to make better what they already have, right? Totally missed it, meaning in the interview process and where, where, what drive, where are we heading towards?

Michael Saitow [00:41:30]:
What's our destination? You know, I think one of the things that you're hitting on for me is around the what behind AI, right? So I used to get these surveys, you know, are you experimenting with AI? And it was like, you know, in cyber, we've been doing AI for a decade, more. In, in materials handling, we've been doing AI for, 20 years, 2 decades, right? So as a carton is riding a conveyor belt and a scanner is reading that conveyor belt and deciding where to put it, the people have blurred the lines between the definition of what we used to think of just ML and what we now— what now is everything falls into this AI umbrella. But is it all really AI? Does it all have to be AI? When is ML good enough. Um, and so we had, you know, workflow automation where when the ATS progressed a candidate through to hiring, it would generate a record in the HCIM and it would generate a record in our identity and access management, right? So automatic employee creation, like all of this stuff just happened automatically from workflow. Well, We used to just call that workflow, but now it's part of the, the umbrella of AI in the broadest sense. And I, I would struggle with this all the time because like when you get the answer, when you get the survey, do you want to give the answer, yes, we're doing AI, or do you want to give the answer of like, no, we're not doing AI, we're doing ML, we're doing automation, we're doing workflowing, but that's not true., you know, agentic experience. We're not leveraging an LLM on a regular basis, and we're not, or we're not doing, you know, any of the graphics or video slop that comes out of our marketing department. We still have people doing those jobs, right? And so you never know what bias the person that's asking you the question or behind AI and where they want their question to go.

Michael Saitow [00:43:37]:
So it's, it's part of that whole, like, we want to hire an AI guy. Well, are they just here to set an AI policy? Are they here to educate us around what AI can be used for in our space? Or are they here to tell us where we're already using it for, you know, automated threat detection or managed detection response or work, employee lifecycle management where we're doing those things automatically or, you know, material handling, supply chain automation. Hey, your package will be delivered in 30 minutes. Here's an automated text, right? I've, it's, it's, it's not AI, but I'm tying together a lot of systems like a location management system on a vehicle with a package that's out for delivery, tying that back to the order management system, tying that back to the customer management system to let them know that their package is 20 minutes away., right? Like those types of things you couldn't do before some of the modern tools, but are they AI or not? And I, I, I still don't know the answer to the question.

Steve Swan [00:44:37]:
I think we're pushing the envelope calling it AI, but we do call it AI, you know? So yeah, I don't know. I don't know. But anyway, well regardless, uh, great conversation. Anything else you wanna add? 'Cause, so I don't know if you walked, watched any of my podcasts all the way through.

Michael Saitow [00:44:55]:
Yeah.

Steve Swan [00:44:55]:
But there's one question, and you probably already know this, and then I ask everybody at the end of each podcast, so I'm gonna get to that in a second. But before I get to that, anything else you, you, you'll want to add to our discussion here before I get to my final?

Michael Saitow [00:45:07]:
No, I mean, it's been, uh, super fun to get to know you a little bit better. Yeah. And share some stories and, uh, you know, yeah. Make fun of your daughter. Yeah. Is this the marathon?

Steve Swan [00:45:14]:
Is this the marathoning daughter, by the way? No, this is the other one. This is the data science, the computer science girl. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. She's actually working for a company now and helping them pull together 3 disparate systems that they utilize and they need to, they need to start talking. So it's, and it's for Wall Street. So anyway, um, so, all right. So my final question that I ask everybody, which you may or may not know, but it looks like you do is, you know, we, we, we, my wife and I go see a lot of bands, a lot of music.

Steve Swan [00:45:40]:
Just last week we saw Billie Strings. This week we're going to see, uh, what are we seeing this week? Dark Star Orchestra. I just bought Warren Haynes tickets for New Year's Eve. Um, so, but, so we, we go, I've seen, we go and see Pearl Jam. We've seen a ton of bands. Um, I was at Live Aid in 1985, junior high school. Parents had no idea where I was.

Michael Saitow [00:45:58]:
Um, have you found the Red Stray Clays? Red Clay Strays?

Steve Swan [00:46:03]:
What's that? The Red Clay Strays?

Michael Saitow [00:46:06]:
No, no. Is that, so that's your, they're in that Billy Strings genre. Oh really? Um, I love Billy Strings.

Steve Swan [00:46:13]:
So yeah, we are, um, That was crazy, that concert, man. I gotta tell you, I didn't know what I was in for. It was like a dance party and everybody at the concert was— so I've been to Phish shows, that's the 40-ish crowd. This was in the 30s kind of crowd, you know, it was just like, wow, you know. So anyway, favorite live band that you've ever seen, a favorite concert that you've ever seen?

Michael Saitow [00:46:35]:
That's my question. It changed this summer. Okay. Uh, one of the best shows I ever went to was, um, Green Day in the pouring rain and the sound system shorted out and, you know, half, more than half of the audience left. And Billy just played acoustic guitar sitting on a milk crate in the middle of the—

Steve Swan [00:46:54]:
and it was like awesome. And that—

Michael Saitow [00:46:56]:
where was that?

Steve Swan [00:46:57]:
Where was that?

Michael Saitow [00:46:59]:
San Francisco. Oh, San Fran. Okay. However, I saw somebody this summer that changed what I thought live music should be like because it was a dance party and Andy Frasco and the UN. Andy, I gotta write that down. And if you don't know him, he's the craziest SOB and gets up on stage barefoot, will drink an entire bottle of Jameson with whoever's in the audience. Yeah. Just super high energy.

Michael Saitow [00:47:28]:
Like you walk in and you're like, what just happened? Yeah, I think I might have gotten electrocuted. I gotta check that out.

Steve Swan [00:47:37]:
Cannot recommend him enough.

Michael Saitow [00:47:38]:
Okay, cool. I got to check that out. I'll send you one of the songs that got me hooked on him.

Steve Swan [00:47:42]:
Do please. I would love to see that. Yeah, that's cool stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I like asking that question because it gives you— it gives the audience a little bit of a personal perspective on the individuals. And I think everybody— I think— well, I haven't had anybody say, well, no, I don't listen to music or whatever.

Michael Saitow [00:48:00]:
I don't know. So it's— we try to go to— we try to go to about a show a month. Yeah. We definitely get to more than that in the summer.

Steve Swan [00:48:08]:
Yep. Yep.

Michael Saitow [00:48:09]:
Yep.

Steve Swan [00:48:09]:
A lot of outside stuff, right? Yep.

Michael Saitow [00:48:12]:
Yeah.

Steve Swan [00:48:12]:
Yeah.

Michael Saitow [00:48:13]:
Cool. Good. Well, this was fun. Awesome. I appreciate it.

Steve Swan [00:48:15]:
Steve, thank you so much.

Michael Saitow [00:48:18]:
Yeah.

Steve Swan [00:48:18]:
And, you know, thanks, thanks for your time and maybe we'll do it again, but we're absolutely gonna stay in touch here.

Michael Saitow [00:48:23]:
All right. I appreciate it.