Ever wonder how partnerships impact your business? What is the breaking point before you need to reach out for help? The People Purpose Podcast travels abroad to His Majesty's Kingdom in London to discuss the impact of partnerships and how you can stay ahead of the curve with your business. Plus learn how much data is consumed via the Google search engine. It's more than you think!
Ever wonder how partnerships impact your business? What is the breaking point before you need to reach out for help? The People Purpose Podcast travels abroad to His Majesty's Kingdom in London to discuss the impact of partnerships and how you can stay ahead of the curve with your business. Plus learn how much data is consumed via the Google search engine. It's more than you think!
Hey, y'all. Rise and shine. And welcome to the people purpose podcast, the show that explores all the ins and outs, challenges and opportunities, HR people, managers, and things all people face at work every single day. I am one of your co host chez fields, and I am joined by my temporary British citizen.
Julie Develin:Julie. Temporary very much so yes. Because I'm here, because I have a passport and I'm not here, not here forever. So I'm in London, Chas in London, and you know, folks can probably hear the background noise behind me. And that's okay. Because where am I?
Chas Fields:You are at Google Next. And we have shared over the last couple episodes of people purpose podcast goes International. However, I'm not there, which is about I was already scheduled. It's a bummer we could have went out I love London. It's a beautiful city. I sent you some recommendations. But it's it's it's an exciting city. However, what people don't
know is it is currently 3:54am in Dallas, Texas, and it is 1050
or 9:54am there in the UK. So
Julie Develin:my body's not really sure what time it is actually, actually flew here from HR tech in Las Vegas, which is a full, I believe it's 10 hours. 10 hours. Yeah, yeah. 10 hour time difference. I didn't, I didn't really know. I don't really know what day or time it is. But that's okay. Because this is a fantastic, fantastic event here. And we're I know we're going to talk about it. So, you know, I guess should we should we start off? And should we, you know, ask our Yeah, if we if we sound like we're out of it, folks, it's because we are. Let me tell you something good. Okay. So there's something good is that here in London, I just happened to be here at a time when the ravens, the Baltimore Ravens a team that I root for, but they're also here. So there's actually a lot of people like from the Baltimore area, which is so weird. For like, and I have friends who when I posted on Instagram that I was going to I was coming here to London, they're like, Wait, you're in London. They're like, we're in London. I'm like, what? I'm like, yeah, so it's like, I haven't seen these folks in a long time. It would be really funny if somehow I'm able to hang out with them converge country, and I had to do it, you know, hundreds of 1000s of miles away across the pond, Chas, as they say,
Chas Fields:across the pond. Yeah, it's not it's not a bad flight either. Especially, I mean, it's a little bit longer from Vegas. But
Julie Develin:you know, it was a bad flight. It was it was 10. Oh,
Chas Fields:you know what, it's not? Had you went from the Northeast where you live? I think it would have been just fine. But that four extra hours is I mean, that's that's it.
Julie Develin:And then and then when I when I fly home, I'm actually flying to Iceland. Oh, that'd be pretty. I'm having well, I'll be able to see the airport. I have a layover in Iceland, which is actually a pretty tight layover for an international flight. So I may be hanging out in Iceland. We'll see. But yeah, so anyway. Yeah. But But we wanted to we wanted to bring the podcast International. You know, we we have a lot of international listeners. We do. And, you know, the topics that we talk about, I think sort of transcend international waters. And I think before I start talking about this, I should ask you what's something good?
Chas Fields:You know, you're not firing on all the cylinders that so I didn't want to feel included into the podcast, okay. Something good is I'm super excited that we'll get to see each other next week. Excuse me. I'm still you know, it's morning. I'm still waking up. But again another day, Jules, I got another day. So we're gonna make the best of it. That's something good. Yeah. And hopefully we get done with this podcast. And I still have time to work out before I have to go catch a flight to go to Wisconsin. So you know what, we're just happy to
Julie Develin:be Wisconsin. London. Same thing. Yeah. So should we talk about should we just get right into the business side of the
Chas Fields:De Yeah. So talking about Yeah, so this is really cool. So Julie mentioned that she's at Google Next. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a second and some of our partnerships and what we do with Google here at UKG. But I found this interesting. I found this on medium.com that talks about data consumption, right, data consumption, and jewelry. We know, AI, if you listen to the last episode around HR tech, that we use a lot of data. And AI is just a massive tool that consumes data as well. So I just I wanted to know, how much data do we use, right? So from our friends@medium.com 200 petabytes, P e, t, a bytes B YT. S, Google it if you want to know how it is measured, of data per day, is processed by Google search
Julie Develin:alone. Okay, how many zeros in a petabyte? That's a
Chas Fields:lot, a lot. Just pull it up.
Julie Develin:Peda. All right. I'm gonna I want to Google that. Yeah,
Chas Fields:so most modern computers have at least one terabyte hard drive in them. So take 200,000 terabytes of them. And that's how much data Google search is handling per day for stocks, jewels.
Julie Develin:That's a lot. Okay, well, I believe I'm trying to figure out here, how many zeros that is, I believe a petabyte is a paycheck. I'm not good at math. So it says 10 With little 15 above the 10. So is that?
Chas Fields:A lot? Tara? Yeah. Peda means a trillion.
Julie Develin:Oh, one. Okay. one petabyte is 1000 terabytes. You know, some estimate, some folks estimate that a petabyte is the equivalent of 20 million tall filing cabinets or 500 billion pages of standard printed text, which I think are most HR folks that have manual processes.
Chas Fields:Some payroll people here saying, yeah,
Julie Develin:yeah, absolutely. Hey, I also want to mention Chas, that, you know, we have we have our booth here at UKG. And you might hear applause. So when I first got here, I think we have a wheel that folks are spinning for win prizes. And I said, What, why are why are people applauding? One of the wins, one of the ways to win is just, we clap. That's it. It's just applause and yeah, it's fantastic. So the little, so I guess it is,
Chas Fields:so the Google search the data consumption joules, yes. Do you think that's a lot? Or do you think that's a little?
Julie Develin:No, it's a lot. It's a lot. It's more than any any of us can ever comprehend in our brain. And that's, and that's the thing, you know, I mean, we say these words, megabyte terabyte, petabyte, whatever the byte that petabyte file is, yeah, I mean, it's, it's crazy. And it's just, you know, it's why we have conferences like this. Google, Google has this conference is Google Cloud Next Conference, in, in the US, here in London, I'm sure they have it other places in the world two. So I think it's important for us, I kinda want to talk a little bit about what I'm doing, or what we are doing here. And what Google Cloud Next is, okay. It's really where decision makers and developers and really anybody who's who's passionate about about this kind of stuff, the AI, of course, cloud computing, they come together to share challenges, solutions, they talk about ideas, and really learn new game changing technologies. There's so many innovations in AI, and data security. And what we do here is basically folks are learning how they can make the most of this generative, generative AI, there's, there's rooms here, in this in this area, where there just was like aI room or AI demo room, right? You can just walk in and experience new products and that kind of thing. So I guess it's important also, for us to talk about our relationship up G. With that with Google, you want to go ahead and talk about that.
Chas Fields:Yeah. So this, you know, this is really kind of an education episode about partnerships to some degree and kind of our presence globally. Since we do have a global audience. Oftentimes, we take the time to talk about better practices and processes and things like that. What I want to talk about a little bit not only the Google partnership, but like what's the breaking point for us as practitioners and leaders to reach out and maybe find a partner that's better to do certain things within our tech stack? You know, Julie, everywhere we go, oftentimes, it's like, oh, we we have a partner. We want to be a partner when we're at things like Google Next or HR Are tech. And I think it's important for our listeners to understand that, although UKG is amazing and everything they do, you know, we have great partnerships with Google. Right? And Google is a, I'm sure everybody's heard of Google, if you have it. That's okay. Reach out to us, we'll talk. But because of our global presence, we lean heavily, you know, on large companies like this, like Google to really set parameters on business growth, right. So what's cool about this is, you know, when we use Google, or when we say Google is our partnership, we talked about it from a Gen AI perspective, we talked about the cloud. We talk about data and services, and what does that mean? So the cool part about it, I want to talk about the cloud for a second July, because I think when we people say the cloud, they're like, oh, yeah, it's, yeah, we understand it. Well, no,
Julie Develin:no one understands what the cloud is. So you're gonna you're gonna answer the question.
Chas Fields:Yeah. Yeah. So so the cloud has a lot of different things, right? The cloud, the cloud is really think about it like servers, right? If you remember, when, when technology in the tech boom, we had what was called on premise, right? You had kind of like your storage in a back office closet that it ran, and nobody's really allowed to go in that closet. Because if you touch something, you lose the internet, right? You lose the place that things are stored. Over the course of time and development, essentially, think about the cloud as multiple servers that talk to each other. So you're in London, I'm here in Dallas, right? And then maybe there's a third location, Iceland? Oh, we lost you, Jules. Let me pause. And she's back. Adrian.
Julie Develin:We're at we're at the mercy of Google's internet. You can imagine Chad's there are 1000s of people here, right, the internet. So I'm probably taking up the most bandwidth of
Chas Fields:the video. Yeah, so So going back to the cloud, you know, essentially, if there's three locations or multiple locations, that information, Trent, you know, transfers or moves, right, from a stable state from one location to another. So it's, it's, it's constantly backing itself up, if you will. So so what happens is like, think about on your phone, right, you take a picture, that then uploads to your cloud, whatever platform you have, and then you know, if your phone gets thrown to the bottom of a lake, you have the ability to get a new phone, and then that information is extracted to the new phone. Right. So that's kind of how the cloud works. It's, it's constantly moving information. So you can keep your storage, but you know, your stuff is backed up, right, and making sure that you know, for from a business function, that you don't lose the data and information that you have. And that's just like one piece of it, right? Like, that's just the storage, but then you think about how information flows from artificial intelligence and data infrastructure. You think about artificial intelligence, Big Query searches, we talked about the data when you're on, you know, just using Google search. And then there's other things that that these large clouds or supercomputers or things that that Google offers from the tech stack that helps you compute information. That's just one piece for the data, then there's, you know, from an AI perspective, you can set parameters around your business rules, you can extract information more specifically, from a data perspective or clean bad data, right? We often talk about bad data in your system is bad data out of, you know, bad decision making out. And then also data transformation. So what's cool about the partnership with Google and UK, G, is that we optimize, you know, both from modeling perspective, but information that makes it easier for you to consume and make better decisions. And that was a very narrow, like, that is, yeah, as laymen as I can get it, if you will.
Julie Develin:Yeah. Yeah. And I don't think we want to go too deep into the intricacies here. But I think it's important when we talk about partnerships, because, you know, there's so many things that, like Google can't be Google without their partnerships. We and UK G isn't as robust without our partnerships, and all companies, right. Major organizations, you know, you have to have people who are helping. So the fact that Google has this fantastic product cloud product that we're able to utilize to make our stuff somes better, safer and more, more robust is is just a benefit for all of us in finding a partner, like Google that's like minded that is, you know, really interested in moving the needle forward, I think I think is definitely important too. So, you know, we UK, G is an early partner of Google's child enterprise grade Gen AI and large language models through what's called vertex AI. And I know that's a lot of information here. Really, what you need to know is that Google and US, UK, G, we are just united in the fact that Jen and Jen AI is this extremely powerful tool, right. And, you know, we UK, g i n Google, right, we have a rich history and responsibility of using AI across our HCM and workforce management solutions. Right. So so this is just something else that we're just sort of doubling down on. And I think that our customers, our prospective customers are going to see so many improvements moving forward, because the rapid pace of technology is just that it's rapid.
Chas Fields:Yeah, I want to I want to go a little bit deeper, though, like for the for those that are listening in our international audience. Yeah. How, like, from a practitioner perspective, when we think about partnerships, and we think about the breaking point of is this enough with whatever solution that we have? Right, what is the breaking point? You know, oftentimes, Julie, when I'm, when I'm working with specific companies, I, I see that they rely maybe too much on a product person or thing in business, right? Like, let's use Excel, for example, a company that operates specifically out of Microsoft Excel, and, you know, there's a lot of manual process, there's a lot of time consumption, it really puts us in a tough position to kind of highlight the actual business needs because of the limitation of what they have. Right. So if I'm solely using Microsoft Excel to do things within my organization, you know, I kind of have a narrow vision. And I'm not saying that, that, that you're wrong for that for those of us and like our company only uses Excel. But it does put downward pressure on our people, when we don't have good partnerships or don't understand when the time is to reach out. So let me ask you this, you know, in your practitioner days, the breaking point, right, when you realized this is not enough, right? How, how did you go about asking for help? Right?
Julie Develin:Yeah, well, step one is knowing when it's not enough, because for a long time, I was using the Excel spreadsheets and the Word documents and just the stuff that just wasn't. And that's when I, the way I went about asking is, I just simply did, I said, Listen, this is where we are, we're being I'm being asked to provide this data, I don't have a good way to extract the data, nor do I have a good way to collect the data, because you have to collect it before you can extract it. So I said, we have to get a system and that friend, you know, I started the our HCM transformation at the organization. And, you know, everything changed at that point. And, you know, back then, and which is really only four ish years ago, we, we didn't have a lot of this conversation, the AI stuff and all that. So the capabilities of HCM systems now, especially up G's, is they're just exponentially better. And they're continuing to get better. And through our partnerships, international partnerships with organizations like Google, and others, were able to provide so many more tools for HR and business folks to really level up their business and level up their employee experience, which is what we're trying to do.
Chas Fields:Yeah, I liked it. You mentioned the breaking point, if you will, where it just is what it is, I think a lot of companies don't necessarily know that they can do that. So it's good to hear you say that I remember working with a company not too long ago that they were asking for something's very, very specific to their business, right. And listen, we're best in class workforce management and human capital management software, like that's what we are. But there was, I don't want to call it a limitation. There were ways that we could go about it, but it wasn't as efficient as the customer would like. So when I was in implementation, I kind of had this moment and you said it without you saying it is there has to be a better way. Like there has to be a way to do this. So I reached out to a partner of ours and said, Hey, is this something that you can build and do for us? US, and you know, our product got the customer there 90% of the way, and then there was that 10%, that really meant a lot to them. If you can figure this out, we would be really forever grateful. Right. And that's, that's the experience that we want to provide. And what was great about that is we understood the need and the desire and the business outcome. Right. And I think that's what you said is we had to, we had to understand the need, like there has to be a better way, right? There has to be a better way. You understood the desire, well, of course, I want to get you 100% of the way there. But the business outcome from that 10% Working with the third party to get them what they need. I mean, this was this was really, really important to them. And more important, is it makes us look really, really good, right? And being outside of the bubble talking about me, and having worked in other systems and experiences in areas we were able to come in, and hey, we can solve this, right? But we as UKG also leveraged a partner in that situation that, hey, they specialized in this, and guess what, boom, got the customer 100% of the way there are happy, and they're happy. So I really appreciate that perspective, Julie, because we we have to remember that if we don't ask we're not going to get it. Right. Like if we don't ask, we're never going to get the answer the results that we need. So what's it what's another area, like from a, from a prescriptive or decision making perspective? Like how would you utilize that kind of strategy, if you will, based on past experience?
Julie Develin:I mean, based on past experience, I think that just talking, talking about this stuff, it's really bringing me back, and it's getting me to a point where I'm like, I'm remembering everything that I just didn't do. And I really think you know, the decision making thing. It's where it's where, you know, Google and UKG, I think are at the forefront of helping out the future of business here, right? Because utilizing our tools and the power of our tools together, that's going to help HR people and other business leaders, right decisions better make decisions faster by leveraging things like AI and machine learning and Gen AI, really across a lot of multiple data entry points. And it can help us to understand how to help people versus just knowing that our people need help, because we all know that our people need help. We all know that we want to create a better employee experience. But do we really know how to do it? So by having these tools at our disposal, you know, chances are something else. And I think it's important for folks to realize, you know, we talked about HCM transformation and new HR tools. There's a lot of HR people and business people that probably don't realize, or they think, how am I ever going to do this myself. Speaking of partnerships, we have a lot of implementation partners who can help to implement the product. It's not that you're out there on an island and have to do it all alone, because as I say, all the time, I never saw an HR department that was overstaffed.
Chas Fields:Or an IT department that doesn't have another project? Yeah,
Julie Develin:exactly. So, so important to recognize it's it's the partnerships go well beyond, you know, the things that we're talking about today, from being able to help help you level up your business, move your business forward, and that kind of thing.
Chas Fields:So I love that perspective, the how to help people versus knowing our people need help, Jay is going to help be prescriptive. Right. So I think I've shared this before, I've been working with our product in the background, a little bit on the future of our product and some of the technology that will be announced in the very near future. And in providing recommendations, right? You know, it's not the Gen AI or artificial intelligence will make the decision for you. Now, that's 100% feasible, if that's the path that you want to go, we do it often in our workforce management solution when it comes to auto approve or shift swapping and things like that, right. But sometimes we just need a little guidance, right? Sometimes we need just a recommendation or a nudge to be like, Hey, Julie is overworked or on the verge of burnout, or whatever the situation may be want to go have a conversation with her. Right? Sometimes we need those nudges because business is fast. As you mentioned, we're constantly changing and things move quickly. And let's be real personal life has a major effect on how we operate at work. So those are the things that people when we say AI or we say Gen AI that that they don't realize that's actually the backend function, right? That's the backend function of providing those recommendations. And another piece and I know We've got to wrap up here, because you've got to go speak. But we also have to visualize kind of the need, if you will, I think oftentimes, when it comes to what is the breaking point, we, we know that we need something, but we don't know how to visualize it. And for us to have flexibility with change, or be more agility be more agile within our technology. It's really helpful for people like me, I'm a picture person, Julie, all right. I am not, I am not a numbers guy at all. Now, I love finance. And I love the stock market. And I love the, you know, studying economics and thinking about the market. But I'm not, I'm not a numbers guy really, at all. So for me, it really helps to visualize what that is for our people. And I think that's where we can leverage things like partnerships, or we can have these discussions were in the days that I was in construction, I manage projects in spreadsheets, right? Most of my work was in the field, I was very rarely in an office, right. And I had really long days in those days, where I really had no insight or ability to see the holistic project I was managing unless it was from a number spreadsheet, where as when I had a map out and I could visualize it, I really reached a breaking point to change the way we were doing business at the time. So this idea of how do we how do we get to the point of visualizing the outcome that we want, whether it's drawing it on a whiteboard, or a piece of paper, you know, me, Julie, on the Scribbler, right on the scribble, I'm like, This is what I want, and I'll show it to like other people. And, and we have to be aware of that, right? Like, we have to be aware that we got to get to the point of, hey, if I want to make better decisions, it can't necessarily be from a spreadsheet, it may need to be graphs, it may need to be charts, it may need to be a map with pin points on it, whatever that means. Because for people like me, if I'm going to be flexible, I have to see the vision of it before I can start making decisions. Does that make sense?
Julie Develin:Yeah, I, it definitely makes sense. And yeah, I mean, I also want to say that when we look at the vision that we think of the vision, we typically always go to the negative what could go wrong? I want to challenge everybody ask yourself what go right, with with a partnership, rather than just immediately go into that negative. And yes, we do have to wrap up. But there's just a couple things I want to I want to mention here. First, I want to thank the UK team, UK GT our colleagues here across the pond for for putting on a fantastic display and the conversations. I mean, this whole time you can see people talking crazy. So many. Yeah, yeah. The other thing I wanted to mention, regarding Google, and I read this on LinkedIn today, that Google's about to do away with passwords. I saw, yeah. How amazing is that? Basically, they're gonna have past keys that are tied to a specific service. And you're gonna get prompt prompts to create and use past keys when signing in. So we don't struggle to remember passwords anymore. And the idea here is because security, so again, yeah, so many of these things are, are security related. And that's what it is because hackers are, you know, they're they're, they're getting more sophisticated every day. So partnering us partnering with Google, you know, they're they're at the forefront of safety, security, that kind of thing. Last thing, I'll say, Chas, this is me. With sock playing soccer. Yeah. For those of you watching on YouTube. Yeah. Google here has a whole setup where they use AI to determine how good or in my case how bad you are at soccer. And by soccer, I mean, football. And by football, I mean, soccer. Yeah. And by football, I mean soccer. So anyway. So yeah, so I thought this was a this was a great conversation. Yeah, for those of you if you think we sound different, it's because we're both pretty tired. And, you know, it's just who we are everybody, those? We know, we have some loyal listeners, and we appreciate that, you know, we are real, and that's who we are. And that's what we're doing here. So what did you find your purpose in my friend?
Chas Fields:We didn't talk about this. So I'll use this as my purpose. You know, thanks to and shout out to all of our international listeners, you know, we have 1000s of customers all around the globe, where you know, even though Julie and I are based in the States, you kgs 1000s of customers around the globe, you know, so if you're in the area of thinking man, how do I better manage my people, right? How do I better manage you know, maybe it's workforce management or I'm not getting something that I need out of my HR system and you want something specific we have a great product. HRS do See that will help you with that. But most importantly, if you are at the breaking point of not knowing where to go ask yourself, Could there be a better way? Right? Could there be a better way. And if it's not through your existing tech stack or their, you know a person, maybe find a partner, maybe find a partner that one of your vendors has to really help you leverage what you have currently, to really help your business thrive. Jules, what do you find your purpose?
Julie Develin:I'm not really good at soccer. So no, my purpose is just that there's so much more to business than just saying siloed as a single agency, we have to make sure that we're leveraging all of the opportunities available to us. The way to do that is to educate ourselves, and also, to not be afraid to ask for what we need. So I'm gonna close this out here, Chas. Don't forget, like, subscribe. I use hashtag people purpose pod. on all the social media websites, check out google.com I know you all do every day right. ukg.com and also go to workforce institute.org research. And, yeah, Chas, I feel like we're not even that far away from each other. You've
Chas Fields:got to get you've got to go see Abbey Road while you're there. You've got to go see.
Julie Develin:I'm not gonna have time to do any sightseeing really. But I'm going to get to know our colleagues here in the UK because chap. I think there's gonna be opportunities for both of us to be here and record these podcasts together in person and can you even imagine how that's gonna go? So?
Chas Fields:Well, we appreciate y'all for listening and Jules, stay safe. We'll see you next week. Cheers.