Looking at an Old Paradigm through a Different Lens with Nathan McBride

As companies evolve, the structuring and management of data become critical for scalability and efficiency. Failure to prioritize this can hinder the adoption of advanced technologies like machine learning.

Nathan McBride, Senior Vice President of IT at Xilio Therapeutics, Inc., joins me today to explore the intricacies of effective data structuring and the critical need to prepare for scalability. We touch on how to harness machine learning and natural language processing in collaborative platforms. 

Nathan and I dive deep into rethinking traditional IT structures and the role of employee experience in shaping a company's success. 

Get ready for insights that could redefine how you approach technology and data management in today's fast-paced biotech environment.

Specifically, this episode highlights the following themes:

• The critical role of data management in scalability and efficiency.
• Strategic approaches to adopting generative AI and handling unstructured data.
• The impact of employee lifecycle management on business outcomes.

Links from this episode:

• Get to know more about Steven Swan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/swangroup
• Get to know more about Nathan McBride: https://www.linkedin.com/in/itsn8
• Learn more about Xilio Therapeutics, Inc.: https://xiliotx.com

Transcript

Nathan McBride [00:00:00]:
If what you're doing is a commodity service, then, yes, big companies will need you, but small companies. I'm not buying. I'm not paying for an FTE to be a commodity service. I can just buy it or learn it myself. So you have to be better than a commodity. You have to be something that's so unique that you can't put a word to it. That's the people I hire.

Steve Swan [00:00:22]:
Welcome to Biotech Bytes, where we speak with it leaders within biotech about their thoughts and feelings around emerging technologies affecting our industry, or that will be affecting our industry. I'm your host, Steve Swan, and today I have the honor being joined by Nathan McBride, senior vp of it at Xilio Therapeutics. Nate, welcome. How are you?

Nathan McBride [00:00:42]:
Great, thanks. Thanks for asking. Thanks for having me on.

Steve Swan [00:00:45]:
Yeah, thanks for joining us. This is great love.

Nathan McBride [00:00:47]:
It's an honor. That's a high compliment.

Steve Swan [00:00:51]:
Last time you heard that was when you graduated from college or something, right?

Nathan McBride [00:00:55]:
Or from the judge.

Steve Swan [00:00:57]:
Right. Well, we won't talk about that one anyway, so. Well, nice. Nice to have you on. Thanks. Love the. Love the background. That's great stuff.

Nathan McBride [00:01:05]:
Oh, yeah, I'm in the barn.

Steve Swan [00:01:07]:
Nice. Very nice. Well, so I always like starting out, you know, just kind of trying to understand an individual, where they came from and how they got to where they are and those kinds of things. So I kind of want to open it up. Tell me a little bit about you and how you got to where you are.

Nathan McBride [00:01:21]:
Sure. So, my road, not supposed to be here, actually, at least in the CIO role, I'm supposed to be a teacher. So I was born and bred to do. And I started with computers back when I was eight or nine with Ti 84. Started running that program, basic at home, making video games with my brothers and doing silly shit like that. And through high school, I worked in the sort of helping with our few computers that were in the computer lab, essentially get them up and running, but never really had a passion for it. I was more interested in video games, programming and computers was sort of secondary. Got my first Mac when I was 13, the first version of the Mac plus, and started learning how to do things on Macs back then.

Nathan McBride [00:02:01]:
I broke mine many times. That taught me a lot, but again, always sort of a diversion and a distraction more than a passion. And then when I went to college, my point of going to college was to study classics and become a Latin and greek teacher, which was my passion, both the teaching and the Latin and Greek, because I had spent too many years taking it and graduated college and did just that. Went and taught Latin at a private school, also helped a little bit in the school with it, but really was sort of secondary. I about halfway through my first year, a little bit further than that, I was called to the mat in terms of helping the school even more to do more it work. And at the end of that year, I wasn't making any money as a private school teacher in New York. But at the end of the year, I decided that I'd wanted to go back to teaching more and doing more kinds of sort of like less of the it and more of the teaching part. So I went to a different school, a different private school in western Mass.

Nathan McBride [00:03:05]:
And it was there that I was teaching hyper studio and Java and C in addition to the premise of teaching Latin as a language. But that was removed from my schedule. Sort of had the wool pulled out from under me. I was the director of it for the entire school. I was an n of one and twelve buildings, 500 students, you name it. And at that point in time, it still didn't occur to me that there was a future with technology in my career. I was still sort of very passionate about becoming a teacher, but I felt like I was being sort of over leveraged for what I knew about technology. So it just so happened that on a freak whim, I went to Macworld back in Boston.

Nathan McBride [00:03:49]:
They used to have it every year, the summer of 97 and ran into a fellow who was the head of it for biotech company and we had lunch together and he said, you know, why don't you just come work for me? Because I was lamenting my budget. My budget was pretty much zero at this school, even though I was spending hundreds of thousands to keep the school alive. So he said, why don't you come work for me? We'll put a job together for you. And I said, really? Okay. And I threw away at that point in time my aspirations of becoming a teacher and just went full corporate. And that's where I've been ever since. And so I've since 97 been working as well. First I started out as a for jack of all trades at my first company and then became the head of it for that company after about five years.

Nathan McBride [00:04:36]:
And then successively have I done that for the duration of my career up to today, where I'm in n of two. I just recently hired a new number one. So I'm now in NM, two at Exilio, and as you said, the head of it. So the teaching thing did come back. I started coaching master of swimming back in college and that I kept doing all the way through 2011, and that was coaching all levels of master swimming. And that sort of gave me that sort of itch with scratch for teaching. And then I realized that there was more to do. So I started taking up mentees and becoming an it mentor that still was getting there, but then it was just implementing full blown educational programs and writing, starting to contribute, and sort of giving out my expertise that way.

Nathan McBride [00:05:26]:
And it's sort of a big giant mishmash now of teaching through all various corners where I still am able to do that. And then the goal is someday to go back to being a teacher.

Steve Swan [00:05:37]:
That's great. That's awesome. And you're in Massachusetts, where there's plenty of schools you can do that with.

Nathan McBride [00:05:44]:
No shortage of private or public schools here in mass, although many of these classics programs are being defunded. So you have to kind of go back into the private sector, private school sector to find Latin and Greek still being taught. The school my daughter's graduating from still has Latin, but they have low enrollment in those classes, which is unfortunate.

Steve Swan [00:06:05]:
I did not know that personally. I never got a kid.

Nathan McBride [00:06:09]:
You spent a whole podcast talking about how important Latin is towards it, but because there was a correlative link there. But we don't have to do that.

Steve Swan [00:06:16]:
Yeah, no. Okay, fair enough. So then how about, you know, I like jumping into, from the technology perspective, what do you see now? What are you seeing and what are you thinking about technologies that are affecting us today and that are going to continue to affect our industry, good and bad, right? I mean, this doesn't necessarily mean it all has to be good, because there are some probably that affect us in negative ways. But what are you seeing and what are your thoughts around technologies now and which ones may affect us in what direction?

Nathan McBride [00:06:48]:
Well, I think there's a couple things. Obviously, the genai effect, this is like, guys, effective. It's happening right now, and everyone's kind of lost their mind. In my opinion, there's really no place you can go to find a sane argument for or against. But the pragmatic side of me thinks that, yes, while there's something there, we're very far from it. We're just still on sort of the clever end of the spectrum today. And so, I mean, I just was watching the announcements the other day that Microsoft is making with all the PCs and releasing the new Windows copilot key and et cetera, et cetera. I look at this as saying, okay, I get it, you're following the trajectory of Genai, and this is the next logical step.

Nathan McBride [00:07:33]:
But you're going to really put an arm based processor laptop in the hands of enterprise grade consumers and then expect them to care that you're trying to make them more creative. It's not going to happen, at least not in large parts of the industry. And this idea that the central thesis that the whole point of Gen AI is to make people more creative is the one that baffles me the most. But I think that there's downstream effects of this, which no one is really talking about, or the competitions are not happening in the public eye. And one of those is another area which I care about, which is the. The move of unstructured data management to structured data management. And I think a lot of companies have wrestled with this for many years, are still wrestling with this, and they're about to face a tsunami of new data that's generated by AI that they have to deal with, that it's going to sit inside these data silos that already are unmanaged, these giant sort of data environments where you have millions upon millions of unstructured data files sitting there with no ontology and no metadata and no control. It's just going to be magnified proportionally, too.

Nathan McBride [00:08:44]:
And so I spend a lot of time thinking about designing models to move away from unstructured data generation to structured data generation. A lot of that has to do with you getting off of Excel, for instance, moving over to a database solution. How many people use Excel to treat it like a relational database when it's not even with vlookups? So there's a big thing that's going to happen. And for companies that haven't already taken a strategic approach towards unstructured data management, they're in for a reckoning in the next three years. I mean, just imagine that. Just imagine that you're a company that allows people to have PCs that have built in OAMa generators, I mean, 3.8 gigs per installation, and they're just generating tons and tons and tons of AI generated context, which is going into these unstructured data libraries as PDF's and word documents, etcetera. It's all garbage data, and they're generating it so fast that you see this curve, which is going up rapidly for unstructured data management, unstructured data creation, but there's no management to correlate with it. Why would you do that? That, I think, is a big problem coming.

Nathan McBride [00:09:52]:
I think a lot about that. I think a lot about what's happening with the move towards Web. And so people tend to forget that the transition between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 is just kind of happening. It's not like there's a day where we switch over to Web three, but it's mostly there. And look at the way that just look at outlook as a client. So Outlook has transitioned to its new look. You can still, I think, opt out, but it's effectively web outlook. Okay, so now you have web Outlook.

Nathan McBride [00:10:22]:
Well, if anyone's following the trends, if you look at word online and Excel online and PowerPoint online, they're mostly analogs to the desktop clients. And what's going to happen is that eventually you will have, and Microsoft's been quietly getting this already, you'll have a licensing scheme where like for instance, when you have a business pro license or even e three, you can just have people only use Microsoft Office online. Well, if you think about the way most other apps are going, which is to say web enabled, even though it looks like it's a fat app, it's actually not. That web app enablement is going to push us towards an enterprise browser. And the conversation has always been, is it an edge versus Chrome versus Firefox versus Safari versus some fringe ones, opera brave, etcetera world? Or are people going to bite the bullet and get into, for instance, what Chrome OS was doing years ago, which is here's a browser and here's your whole world inside this browser, I can control your whole environment for you. The Enterprise Browser's day is right now. It's like literally right around the corner and there's companies like island. So I love island because they've not only solved it, they've gone past solving it like a no brainer.

Nathan McBride [00:11:42]:
I mean, centralized enterprise browser management, that's not chrome Os. And you don't need some sort of e three plan with entra in Azure to go ahead and manage edge. You can sort of bypass all that. So what are my options? Well, you know, I can go all in on Microsoft ecosystem and really, really sort of make it easy for a lateral attack in the event of a, in the event of a cyber attack. Or I can sort of spread out the wealth, go to a low cost enterprise browser and now enforce what you can see on which page how you're going to authenticate to the browser. So that met MFA and Iam enablement. I think it's just the way we're going to end up. We're going to end up with people saying, hey, listen, just give me a cheap PC or Mac.

Nathan McBride [00:12:30]:
You can find one, let them use the browser and call it a day. That's it. You don't need anything else. You don't need fat apps installed. I don't need to go ahead and touch your machine and worry about viruses and whatever, because all that, everything that's happening that's important is happening inside this encrypted browser. And think about the overhead that goes away with an enterprise browser. So we're deploying island right now in our company, and I cannot wait till it's done, because what it means is that every single new employee here's a laptop, the one you asked for. I don't even care about it.

Nathan McBride [00:13:02]:
Your full local admin, have at it. Here's this browser you have to log into. I don't care what else happens on this PC or Mac that is going to go along with this sort of data world that we're moving to. So this web 3.0, you know, I think we're going to be a very, very long way from web four. I think the blockchain effect is still quite a ways away. But what will happen is web three will blur into web four. And so again, these are sort of parallel threads, which people have sort of tended forget about, because all of a sudden they have to deal with this other thing. And I had.

Nathan McBride [00:13:39]:
I'll just give you one more antidote, which is that I was. I just recently finished a class at MIT that was a TLP, their technology leadership program, which is anything but, but that's a different story. I had 50 people in my cohort and I asked all of them, pretty much all of them to a degree, where they sort of sat in terms of the genai spectrum. So I was like, just querying people about this. It was like 50 50. Some people were like, I can't wait to use it. Other people are like, I'm not so sure about it for my company, etcetera. But the bottom line was that nobody, 50 people, all sort of it leaders, not one of them a year ago, had generative AI in their it strategy.

Nathan McBride [00:14:19]:
Not one. Some might have had, like, machine learning, oh, yeah, we're going to do this NLP investigation, whatever, nobody. And now everyone's putting it in for no reason. Like, there's no reason. Just stick with your machine learning plan, stick with your NLP plan, stick with your overall AI approach, but be pragmatic about it. And that was, that was the general, you know, feedback I got from people.

Steve Swan [00:14:44]:
So my gut is, as I'm talking to leaders like yourself, and if you go back looking at some of my podcasts, the it leaders, you know, it seems to me, anyway, nobody's coming out and saying this, but it seems to me that they're getting pushed in this direction by their leaders, right? Their coos, their CEO's, their CFO's because of FOMO fear missing out. And I think that that's where this is coming from, Nate. I think that folks are, they don't know why, but they're doing this. And then when you come to, you know, use cases, right, theyre like, well, we dont really have much yet, right. And a lot of it has to do with, Im going pretty much backwards with everything you said, you know, in current chronology here. A lot of it has to do with that data, right. The data seems to me, again, Im using my anecdotes from all the folks ive spoken to. Thats the gasoline that drives this engine.

Steve Swan [00:15:33]:
And mostly the data is not ready. Ill give you one person that mentioned it on my podcast, Bob McGowan, the CIO of Regeneron. Pretty big company, pretty good company. I asked him at the very end of that, I said, bob, what piece of advice would you give somebody like a Nate? I didn't say Nate, right. But I said somebody at a small company whose company is going to grow, what would you have done differently at the beginning that would make your life a lot easier today? He said, that's easy. Get your data ready. If you start when you're a smaller company, if you start when you're a smaller company, you don't have to deal with, he didn't say unstructured to structure, but that's where he was going. Right.

Steve Swan [00:16:11]:
Get your data in shape, he said, so that you can continue to use it. He said, we're dealing with 30 years of data right now, plus we're adding oodles and oodles of data every day. So to get through this is a huge, huge task. And that's exactly what you were just saying. I mean, spot on.

Nathan McBride [00:16:25]:
That's it. I mean, I'm helping. So I do, I do a lot of fractional CIO work, too, on the side. And I'm helping two companies right now who are still small enough to stop the calamity. They're just in the edge of making some, like some growth based initiatives that would basically propel them over the you can't go back line. So for companies that have already gone over that, they have to sort of pick a line, right? Okay. Just say we have one petabyte of just data unstructured data use a number. Well, you have to kind of put all that, say, okay, from this day forward, all new data will go into this new green filled location.

Nathan McBride [00:17:04]:
And then over time, whether they use AI to do this or machine learning or some other mechanism, over time, we'll pull data, we'll de abstract it, we'll give it some classic metadata, we'll put it into its new location. And when I did this at auxiliary, so one of the first products I did when I got in there was to move everything out of sharepoint and teams into a new ontology and then shut down sharepoint in teams. And there was stuff in email and disks. It was everywhere in the lab to do this, it was okay not even to think about what we have. We're going to create the ideal. Here's what this new ideal perfect structure would look like. And everyone was involved in it, every function, every program team. We designed it, and it was beautiful.

Nathan McBride [00:17:44]:
And it's empty. Then we said, okay, here's all the data we have. How much of it do you really need in this new thing? Turns out only a fraction of it. Maybe out of the 16 million or so files, we only moved about a million into the new location. The other 15 million put into archive. And we have them. We can search on them, but they're not important anymore. We only have the data now in this new structure that we care about and net new data now.

Nathan McBride [00:18:11]:
We've accomplished a lot of things by doing this and certainly made ourselves very. When we've hit the fair standard, which was huge goal for us, and it was about nine months of work. I mean, it was intensive to get to where we are. But now every single person that walks in that company, they can find things without having to ask somebody. It's natively intuitive, it's scalable to x. We could have a thousand products and it will just, it'll slot in. And the best part is people proof. It doesn't matter who leaves, it doesn't matter who wins the lottery.

Nathan McBride [00:18:41]:
We're not allowed to stay hit by a bus anymore. So whoever wins the lottery doesn't matter. Go ahead and leave. We've got it all perfect. It doesn't, it's not affected by your presence.

Steve Swan [00:18:50]:
Right? That's great.

Nathan McBride [00:18:51]:
That's big.

Steve Swan [00:18:52]:
That's huge. You know, and there was another CIO I was talking to who works for PE firm. They have portfolio of companies, right? One of the companies deals with AI, you know, helping companies with AI. And he said over 70% of these projects fail and they fail because everybody builds the shiny cool, like we just talked about, the shiny cool thing, but neglects the data, like, oh, right, we got to get back to that. Right.

Nathan McBride [00:19:13]:
So I mean, why would you buy like a Ferrari and then fill with unleaded gas? If you go ahead and put it, put an LLM that's full of garbage underneath a wonderful Genai engine. Every single time someone asks a query and then uses it and then puts it back into the LLM, they're just continuing to poison the well. And it goes from a one x to a two x to 1000 x in very short time.

Steve Swan [00:19:37]:
Yeah. So, so to circle back on that, you, you think that if we get this right, if we get our data right and stick with our, stay focused right, stick with our original principles, even before the Genai term started coming out, we're going to be in good shape as an industry.

Nathan McBride [00:19:55]:
I think we will. But I think the thing is, a lot of the technology was already there. So I want you to think about sort of like your big data storage collaboration platforms, your new sharepoint, your box ignite, Dropbox. They already, they've had machine learning and NLP in their engines for five years, six years, I mean, even further for box. And you just go into the search and you're typing and it's doing natural language search, it's just built right in. Right? So no one talks about that. No one says, we're already machine learning enabled, we're already NLP enabled. They're just like, they want something that says NLP in the tagline, they want to buy NLP, but they're like, really? In fact, they already have it.

Nathan McBride [00:20:39]:
I think that if you were to look at your it strategic plan, yes. Inside that plan, there should be a little tiny thing that says, investigate Gen AI, start an internal project team, or a cross functional committee whose role it is to create a charter and a governance, and to think about it, engage in a dialogue, and then see, okay, is there a use case for us today? No. Okay, let's check again in a month and then slowly think about it. But I taught everybody in my company, minus just a small handful of people last fall, on how to do prompt queries. I said, you know what, this thing's coming. You all better at least know how to learn how to write a query. And so once you graduated from my prompt query training at Exilio, you were able to use cloud or claude, depending on how you pronounce it. So you got a clot account.

Nathan McBride [00:21:31]:
And about 90% of my company has a Claude account, and they're free to use it because they're doing so under pretty much strict teaching for prompt query rating. And we also use APA for our citation rules. And so those two things go hand in hand. Now, in June, we're going to be starting a pilot where we're going to be piloting Poe, Poe. And Poe is a tool that lets you compare multiple genai results from multiple engines at the same time. So you write one query and then you get to see how all the engines translate it. We're going to have a team of about twelve people that are piloting Po. From there, the outcome is only to see if there's an advantage in a force multiplier effect.

Nathan McBride [00:22:14]:
If there's a force multiplier effect, we might deploy it. If there's no force multiplier, if it's still burdensome to generate a result, we will not deploy it. Genai only works when it's a force multiplier. And people just discount the fact that, oh, I wrote this query, I got this result, so it must be true. They don't realize that every time that you write a query and you get an answer, you then have to go and prove it. You have to have that explainability, and that's not a force multiplier. I mean, if you're writing someone a condolences email, I mean, who gives a shit? But if you're going to write something that's going to go into the canon of your company, better be verified, and that's not a force multiplier.

Steve Swan [00:22:51]:
So you're saying get data ready, get the technology in place, but don't force feed it, you know? Yeah. Let it take its natural course. Yeah.

Nathan McBride [00:23:00]:
If you want to do anything, go ahead and put wrangle unstructured data as your strategic goal and then see what happens. Make that a priority.

Steve Swan [00:23:08]:
Yeah, yeah. Okay. All right. Yeah, no, that makes sense because again, getting back to that fomo thing, everybody's pushing something or getting into something. They're getting out over the front of their skis. Right. They're getting too far ahead of themselves. And we got to take this as it comes.

Steve Swan [00:23:23]:
Right, right.

Nathan McBride [00:23:24]:
And the industry's not helping. I mean, computer world, info world, all these sort of easing digests and all the Twitter stuff and everything, they're not helping this idea. I mean, yeah, we have all these, there's three tech accords now globally, and the three tech accords, these groups of superpower people trying to come up with a way to use gen AI, it's the same 16 people. So if you look at it from even further back, there is a global approach towards generative AI, which is occurring around us, which is pushing the narrative. You don't have a choice but to either accept it or sit back and say, that doesn't make sense, and I want to investigate it more. And some people are just conceding the fight now, which blows my mind. I say fight it. Fight it all the way.

Nathan McBride [00:24:13]:
This windows copilot key fight that don't buy an arm based PC for your company. Intel may come along someday and get on board with this. They're not right now, so stay with what you have.

Steve Swan [00:24:25]:
So I think this may dovetail into my next thing. Right. So let's talk real quick about, you know, your organization working for you, right. And how that would be different than working for another place. Obviously, you're talking. I mean, things you're talking about, you're hitting it from a different angle than most people hit it. So do you. You know, you said you just hired your first real sort of right hand person there, right? Is that what differentiates you working for you and your organization than from some others? Or is there something bigger there that you think is different?

Nathan McBride [00:24:58]:
I'm non traditional just by default, and so. And that's just the way it is. It's not something that I strove to like. My brand's going to be anti status quo. I don't appreciate the fact that people don't take the time to think about the decisions in a lot of cases and they just accept whatever XYZ analyst says. So in my case, I did have a number one, actually, that I hired when I got to Exilio. And she was somebody that had worked for me before, just brilliant, brilliant digital sort of sorceress. And the problem is we had had basically a company had flatlined a little bit because we were waiting for some data and some funding, and the funding occurred.

Nathan McBride [00:25:37]:
We're still waiting on the data. But, you know, her career had sort of stalled out, and I. That's not acceptable to me. And so she went off to another company, and it was very, very good move. Now, that left me sort of by. By myself again for a little while. But I found another person who is a little bit less senior than she was, but this new person, Miranda, she's brilliant, and she's the next generation. And when I look for people to hire from my department, and this goes back a very, very long time, I don't want somebody who knows how to write a database.

Nathan McBride [00:26:11]:
I want somebody who knows how to fix Meraki AP's I don't really care. That's like, I don't know, table stakes in my opinion. I want somebody who's got a new perspective on employee experience, on sort of the digital experience, who is going to ask all the right questions and who's going to be. I hired Jackson Janes of all trades. I don't want somebody who's a specialist in one area. I want somebody specialist in multiple areas. And I find this is beneficial for a couple reasons, not the least of which is these people have the best shot at a very, very long and amazing career than somebody who's going to just be a cloud infrastructure person. If your specialty is AWS and that's the first line in your resume, then I'm sorry, you're not making CIO.

Nathan McBride [00:26:57]:
That's just all there is to it. In my department, large or small, as they've been over the years, the expectation is that here's what you're going to, here's the big paradigm that we're going to try and solve, and your place in it is to help me and you're going to be my thought partner, help me solve everything for everything. And this is, this results in new approaches that I haven't conceived of before. This results in going back in time sometimes and saying, well, that thing we did ten years ago, that's relevant again. And I put the expectation there, which is if you're just coming in expecting to do nine to five and solve help desk tickets, you're in the wrong place. There's companies that will hire you that will do just that. But in my department, it's constant learning. It's constant.

Nathan McBride [00:27:47]:
My expectation is that everybody that works for me will go to the ends of the earth to improve themselves and self develop, self train. When this new person, Miranda, started for me, I was like, okay, here's the eight certifications you're going to get this year. Okay, when am I working? I said in between, and you're going to learn everything there is to learn about all these areas because they're all going to be critical in five years. And so it's just like throwing people into that place and saying, and then you're going to challenge me to come back and tell me that my idea is shit and tell me why, and then let's put in something better. But yeah, I mean, I came from the help desk ranks and so my, I have strengths in a lot of areas of it, I wouldn't say everything, so I can walk the walk and talk the talk, which makes it pretty neat to be in my group, but I learn a ton from people.

Steve Swan [00:28:46]:
The aid certifications, are they your weaknesses?

Nathan McBride [00:28:49]:
No. No. In fact, the first one that she's getting is itil four foundations. And the reason we get it is so that we cannot use it. So I make everybody work for me, get itil for foundations, because when I think about itsm, I'm saying, listen, there's foundations. That's one way to think about things. So go out and learn how SBS works and how it applies in a normal corporation, then can work for me, and we're going to throw all that away, and we're going to help with a new model. And so my model for service is like almost nobody else, the way I do it.

Nathan McBride [00:29:18]:
But we learn itil so that we don't fall into the trap of itil then she will go on and learn. She'll become a slack admin, a box admin, AWS admin. She'll get AWS associate, she'll get. There's a wonderful python cert right now in Coursera. So, one after another, the Google cyber security Cert, which I think is a good gateway to getting additional cybersecurity certs. You start with network, get a. Get security. Plus, once you've gotten those done, Google cybersecurity would be the next line, and so on and so forth.

Nathan McBride [00:29:50]:
So does she want. Does she have cybersecurity aspirations? No. But should she know every single thing there is to know about cybersecurity? Absolutely.

Steve Swan [00:29:57]:
You know, it's funny, you say what you just said. You're taking that cert so that we understand why we're going in the other direction. I say that to my father all the time. My father's 86, super opinionated in many, many different directions. I say, dad, read every article you can on the other opinion. Right? Talk to every person you can. Don't just shut it down because you don't want to hear it. This will help you understand and solidify your argument as to why your opinion and your angle is that much better.

Steve Swan [00:30:23]:
He just looks at me with his head cocked. He's like, that makes no sense to me. I'm like, I get it. You're 86.

Nathan McBride [00:30:28]:
Anybody who wants to even care about employee experience and do so in an itsm world will know Covid, they'll know Itil, they'll know HDI. Like, they'll know every single type of program and sort of paradigm and then be able to pick, like, okay, I like this, and I like that. That doesn't make any sense to me over there, so forget that. And so to know Itil foundations. And Itil has wonderful classes and even foundations is a wonderful class. But the idea of svs, to be able to put that into a company or even Covid, nobody does that. Nobody's like, where Covid come from. No, they're like, well, we like the risk matrix functionality in Covid, or we're going to do, erm.

Nathan McBride [00:31:12]:
Pick and choose. Right. But you have to know them all. But, yeah, I can't stand. I can't stand foundations.

Steve Swan [00:31:18]:
Well, so, yeah, a lot of smaller companies, they don't go to the length that you do, but a lot of smaller companies are more of the, you know, gotta wear a lot of different hats. All hands on deck. It's not nine to five. That stuff, the other mindset that you talked about, you know, punching the clock and doing your little tiny thing, that's a. I don't want to pick on J and J or somebody like that, but that's a big company kind of mentality, you know. Now, again, there are incubators, there are smaller, there are groups inside those companies that maybe do operate. What's the word I want to look for more freely. Right.

Steve Swan [00:31:50]:
But for the most part, like you said, it's a different mindset, and I get that a lot.

Nathan McBride [00:31:55]:
If what you're doing is a commodity service, right, then yes, big companies will need you, but small companies. I'm not buying. I'm not paying for an FTE to be a commodity service. I can just buy it or learn it myself.

Steve Swan [00:32:06]:
Yep.

Nathan McBride [00:32:06]:
So you have to be better than a commodity. You have to be something that's so unique that you can't put a word to it.

Steve Swan [00:32:12]:
Right.

Nathan McBride [00:32:13]:
That's the people I hire, Jeff.

Steve Swan [00:32:15]:
Yeah, yeah. I say that my daughter's computer science out in University of Pittsburgh. Data science and statistics and stuff. And she always says to me, dad, I'm not going to be a programmer. I'm like, I get that. That's if you're strictly programming that's done somewhere outside of our borders and you're out of a job, you know? Sure, get in with the business, understand what they need and what they want. So, you know, she. She's doing a lot of what you were talking about earlier.

Steve Swan [00:32:39]:
She helped a company, a consumer, a company that does works with fashion brands and celebrities, and they have 70 million person database. And she helped them take that from unstructured to more structured data and, you know, selling that to AI companies and stuff. Yeah, yeah.

Nathan McBride [00:32:54]:
I would say also that there's a new world coming for people that are in data science, and it's largely unexplored, which is the human data that exists in a company. And again, this is overlooked in terms of the overall employee experience arc. But if you know how to measure an employee's engagement and, like, truly measure it now, not just like an annual survey or something, but truly measure it from two weeks before they start to the day that they leave. And, you know, and you can measure every single trough and peak of their life cycle. You can do a lot of things, including have a reasonably a close prediction as to when they're going to leave. You can do things like loyalty mapping, et cetera. There's so much, companies are so richly data centric now because of everything around them, the Robins and the greenhouses and all the Hri s. They're just, they have so much stuff, no one's looking at it.

Steve Swan [00:33:48]:
Bill Pierce at Bio IVT, who I did my a podcast with, he lives up in Maine, but Bio IVT is a, it's a port company for a P. Linden is the p. He talked a lot about Elm employee lifecycle management. There's softwares and stuff out there now. And he's like, this is such great data. He said the same thing you just said.

Nathan McBride [00:34:08]:
Yeah, there are companies that like people, productive as one. You know, just do spot polls and things like this. Right, great. No problem. But there's data below that, like how many emojis are on slack that are positive emojis. And, oh, we're seeing a trend. There was 1000 less this month. Well, why? Or this person generally tends to do x, and now they're doing y.

Nathan McBride [00:34:30]:
Now there's a, there's a bit of, like, big brother insidious stuff for this. But if you abstract it even under Genai, I can, I don't need to know that Steve is doing emojis, but I can in the aggregate see what Steve, whether he's happy or not, I can know this data. Plus I can go and directly get it, like, hey, Steve, here's a quick poll. You hate your manager. You're like, no. Okay, cool. Thank you. All right.

Nathan McBride [00:34:53]:
That's a plus for your manager. But I mean, think of like, Google did that wonderful experience experiment, Aristotle. And there's all kinds of now new experiments coming out about how to measure humans.

Steve Swan [00:35:09]:
Yeah.

Nathan McBride [00:35:09]:
In a company. Well, and whoever conquers that, it's going to be a gazillionaire.

Steve Swan [00:35:15]:
So it's got to be then. I mean, if we make a dashboard. Right? I'm just. My brain's going to. I'm sitting in HR, and I pull up Steve Swan, and ultimately I have a score next to his name. Maybe a couple scores, you know, happiness Wednesday, going to be out of here. That kind of stuff. And I don't even know what goes into it because I'm in HR, but it just all populates, and it's just like, wow, cool.

Steve Swan [00:35:37]:
Okay, Steve's. Steve longevity score is down to a two. He's about to split. He's out of here. You know, his happiness scores at a six. You know, we got to start doing something if we want to keep him around. Right?

Nathan McBride [00:35:48]:
What if you not only knew that, but you knew who was loyal to Steve, who Steve influenced and who influenced him, and you were able to see that. So, like, okay, here's Steve. Here's the five people he influences. Here's two people that influence him.

Steve Swan [00:36:01]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Nathan McBride [00:36:02]:
And here's his. Here's his loyalty, strength. Well, if Steve is leaving and unhappy, this is a good chance. We have to. We now have to go double down on these people.

Steve Swan [00:36:09]:
Yeah.

Nathan McBride [00:36:10]:
And make sure that they're happy. And so you get into this, and I have talked about this with many, many people about eliminating it, eliminating HR and creating a new function which is totally dedicated to experience. And people think it's nuts, but I think it's got legs. Anyway, this idea is that not only do you know, but you have a reactive force, because, again, we don't have that. Right. HR gets this bad name. Oh, you know, the terminating people or whatever, and it has a service function, then no one's really getting the due respect that they should be in terms of, hey, you know what? Is Steve happy? No. Why? Well, his computer sucks.

Nathan McBride [00:36:53]:
That's an it problem. It's not, actually. That's, like, a bunch of people problem. And where's Steve? Unhappy? No, because his desk, you know, it's in a shitty place. He doesn't like to be around these people, that it's involved with that, too. Like, there's a lot of people in this circle that should know and be able to respond to this. And so what do we do? We wait six months until Steve's like, forget it, I'm leaving. Resume goes out, it's too late.

Steve Swan [00:37:15]:
Yeah, right.

Nathan McBride [00:37:16]:
Can't get him back, right?

Steve Swan [00:37:18]:
Huh? Yeah. Again, I thought about the elm, the employee lifecycle management that Bill was talking about, but you're taking it to a, you know, and he scratched the surface on it, you know, in our podcast, a little bit. You know, you're really going deeper than that. And it's getting. Getting my wheels turned. I hope anybody that's watching this is getting their wheels turned. And that's great stuff.

Nathan McBride [00:37:36]:
You know, it's something good to obsess about, I think.

Steve Swan [00:37:40]:
Yeah, no, I think it's great. Especially in my business. Right. I got to be thinking about this stuff, or at least be plugged into it, or at least be able to. I've had. I can't tell you, I've had. Many, many times I've spoken to companies and they talk about an individual and this, that and the other thing, and someone's not happy or whatever. I can't tell you how many times, two, three years later, they were pushed into a job and then their job was eliminated.

Steve Swan [00:38:02]:
Well, that's their, that's their. That's their methodology. Right. That's. They're going to push them out of the company somehow, you know?

Nathan McBride [00:38:07]:
Absolutely. And if you go and talk to people, like a month after they've left the company and say, what happened? They'll tell you straight up, like this, this and this. Well, that's still data. Like, you now know this. It might be anecdotal, but it's still data. Feed it back into the machine.

Steve Swan [00:38:21]:
Yeah, it's all good. It's all good stuff. So a couple more things. There anything else that you think we should hit on from an it perspective that's going to affect our industry that we haven't really hit on here, you know, sort of big picture?

Nathan McBride [00:38:34]:
Well, I just. I mean, I briefly just talked about it, but somewhere between the decentralization of it as a standard and the creation of a new function that combines it, HR probably facilities, too, I think, is sort of a worthwhile topic, and no one's really willing to have it because HR is a very powerful function. Just go back to the history of why HR exists and you'll find out why that is. But there's a new time to be thinking about it. And the structure of an organization and the traditional CIO and all of his lackeys or her lackeys model is coming to an end. I don't want to be a CIO that just has four direct reports and keep doing that model until I retire. I want to think about this in a new way. I also think that cybersecurity needs to be taken out of it once and for all.

Nathan McBride [00:39:20]:
Let the CISO have their rule. Have them work hand in hand with it. But Ciso or the CIO Ciso, rather should be reporting the CEO, not an it. The fact that it still has securities because it's a dumping ground, right? I don't know where this goes. I just throw it in it. Well, then when that started a bunch of years ago, it was natural because we had firewalls and all this other crap. It's not natural anymore, it just happens. Right? So I think this is.

Nathan McBride [00:39:45]:
We need to start thinking about the IT organization in general, and I don't know if anyone's going to have that argument. CIO's are happy in their position. Boondoggles and vendor Schwag and all the other perks that come with being a CIO, just put them down and set aside for a second. You'll find there's actually value and reconsidering the paradigm, I think.

Steve Swan [00:40:05]:
Well, I've had that conversation too many times that you just brought up the CISO reporting to the CIO. Essentially, you know, something goes wrong, they got to tell on their boss, right? I mean, I mean, little governance issue there, right? Wouldn't you say?

Nathan McBride [00:40:22]:
Oh, totally. And especially when you get into, erm, like, if you truly want to do enterprise risk management, your company, you cannot have the. The fox sitting in the henhouse. You got to take it out. Oh, my God. I can't even tell you how many times I'm just scratching my head saying, why is. Why is security, like, reporting into the head of it and running?

Steve Swan [00:40:40]:
Erm.

Nathan McBride [00:40:41]:
It should be.

Steve Swan [00:40:41]:
I filled a lot of those roles, those CISO roles, right? And every time, you know, the CISO knows it, that's going in, or the head of security knows that's going in, saying, I'm reporting to the guy that I got a. Well, a couple guys had come to me and said, hey, I need something written into my contract, right? So that if I get let go for doing my job, I get some level of one year parachute or whatever the number is, you know what I mean? And it doesn't happen too often. They're like, no.

Nathan McBride [00:41:09]:
C says, I'm not getting their due. CISO should either be running it or be running alongside it, but not reporting into it, ever.

Steve Swan [00:41:17]:
My daughter, like I just said, who's doing data science? I tried talking her into security. She did her homework. She goes, I'm not doing that.

Nathan McBride [00:41:24]:
You know, Cio's just do a traditional paragraph, you know, build a fortress around them. And that includes security. And. Okay, I got all my people. It's good, responsible. Take it out. Oh, my God. Development too, while you're at it.

Steve Swan [00:41:37]:
Yeah, shake it upside down. We're shaking it. We're shaking the whole. The whole everything right now.

Nathan McBride [00:41:43]:
Oh, man. We can do all 3 hours more on just one topic.

Steve Swan [00:41:47]:
Maybe we'll do another one. So anyway. All right, well, I think we've covered quite a bit, you know, maybe a little more than other than people want to chew right now, you know, but I love talking about this stuff. This is great stuff. So. So do I. I always ask folks one last question before we break. If you've watched any of my podcasts all the way through, you know what it is, so.

Steve Swan [00:42:06]:
And if you don't, no big deal. But I think you'll be able to handle it. What has been thinking back through your life? Your favorite live concert that you've ever seen?

Nathan McBride [00:42:16]:
Pink Floyd, 1994.

Steve Swan [00:42:17]:
There it is. Nice.

Nathan McBride [00:42:19]:
Where?

Steve Swan [00:42:20]:
Giant stadium.

Nathan McBride [00:42:20]:
You said Gillette Stadium. Gillette Stadium, or what was called Foxborough at the time.

Steve Swan [00:42:24]:
Yes, yes. Very cool. Very cool.

Nathan McBride [00:42:26]:
I question.

Steve Swan [00:42:28]:
I recently saw Roger Waters, and he removed all the David Gilmore solos out of his songs because. Because they're not buds anymore.

Nathan McBride [00:42:36]:
Right.

Steve Swan [00:42:36]:
You know.

Nathan McBride [00:42:37]:
Nope. He, Roger Waters, I mean, for better or for worse, wrote about what's happening in our world right now. All the way back in 19, 1984, 87, he already knew this was going to be. Just read Roger Waters and then put an equal sign 2024 next to it. That's Roger Waters.

Steve Swan [00:42:55]:
It's crazy. Yeah. You know, but I was kind of bummed he took those solos and stuff out, you know, I saw you can.

Nathan McBride [00:43:03]:
Listen to, listen to final cut end to end and not even missed Gilmore.

Steve Swan [00:43:08]:
You know, Warren Haynes government mule does a great. They do dark side of the mule, right?

Nathan McBride [00:43:14]:
Yeah, we saw that last year at harbor lights.

Steve Swan [00:43:16]:
Yeah, I saw it down here. I've seen it twice. Thought last summer, the summer before. It's great. It's great.

Nathan McBride [00:43:20]:
Yeah. I wish you were here. I mean, that thing, they just kill it. They kill it. And comfortably numb. No, no question beyond compare.

Steve Swan [00:43:29]:
Yeah. Pro GM tries to do comfortably numb. That's. That's okay.

Nathan McBride [00:43:33]:
I see every single time Brit Floyd comes through New England, I see Britt Floyd every show that they do here. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. The best cover band and they just nail it.

Steve Swan [00:43:42]:
Never, never even thought about that. But now that's on my radar.

Nathan McBride [00:43:45]:
Okay, see, Brit Floyd, forget Aussie Floyd. I mean, no offense to Aussie Floyd, they play the hits, but Brit Floyd, they go deep.

Steve Swan [00:43:52]:
Really?

Nathan McBride [00:43:53]:
Yeah, like echoes deep.

Steve Swan [00:43:54]:
Okay. All right, well, I'll take the advice because I like seeing live stuff. Unfortunately, I'm going to see the stones in a couple weeks. I mean, I just got to do it. I haven't done that yet.

Nathan McBride [00:44:03]:
Right.

Steve Swan [00:44:04]:
So it's basically a bunch of cartoon characters running around up there now.

Nathan McBride [00:44:07]:
Yeah. But, hey, I made the mistake of seeing Motley crue, I don't know, a couple years ago, and I regret it because the last time I saw them before that, it was amazing. And this time, it was the saddest, saddest thing. No. If again, Motley crue, love you to death, rocket. But they shouldn't have been on stage.

Steve Swan [00:44:23]:
Oh, really? That's not good.

Nathan McBride [00:44:25]:
It was. It was hard to watch.

Steve Swan [00:44:27]:
I saw Neil young a couple weeks ago. That was actually not bad. It was actually not bad.

Nathan McBride [00:44:31]:
He still got it.

Steve Swan [00:44:32]:
He does.

Nathan McBride [00:44:32]:
He's still got it together.

Steve Swan [00:44:33]:
He does. 78 years old, and he's still doing it. His bass player is 80. He had a little, you know, whatever, but it was good.

Nathan McBride [00:44:40]:
Not a whole lot of the jumping around on stage. But you know what? It doesn't matter. Give him a chair and a guitar and blow your mind.

Steve Swan [00:44:45]:
Yeah, yeah. He can do it. He can do it. So anyway, well, thank you very much for being with me.

Nathan McBride [00:44:51]:
Problem. Thanks for having me on.