Digital Transformation: How Businesses Can Benefit
Transcription
Dan: Good morning, Vincent and Sam, how are you doing this morning?
Sam: And how are you, sir?
Dan: Well, we're doing pretty good over here and in isolation.
Vince: **inaudible** we can knock this nonsense off.
Dan: Yeah, I think so. So how are you guys working it in your building? You're starting to bring people back in slowly?
Vince: We've been back for two weeks. I don't know that we ever really left. I mean, we let people work remotely if they chose to, but we've pretty much stayed open and been operational all the way through. Two weeks ago, almost three weeks ago, I think it is now we basically said, okay, we want everybody back in the office, it's over, it's when the government, not government, but the governor opened up, what was it? Phase one, phase two, whatever they're calling it now.
Sam: Yeah.
Dan: I gotcha. So phase one, you guys are back in and of course, phase two, a lot of things are opening back up. And, just real, real quick, Vince, I know that the chamber is starting to get things back together and there's getting to be more meetings, face-to-face meetings and things are starting to get back to normal somewhat within the chamber. Is that right?
Vince: Yeah. I mean, we've been doing some face to face meetings with small groups all the way through. I mean, we had our executive meeting this past week where we had a combination of people remote and in person. We did our first **inaudible** coffee virtually. But I think if the governor opens up into phase three in July, we will be back full swing and it's dependent upon the governor. It's also dependent upon the First Baptist Church and what they choose to do with their location. My understanding right now is that Dustin is going to have a full in-person first Friday coffee, or I don't remember what theirs is actually called.
Dan: Yeah, something.
Vince: And night mills, I'm not really sure about theirs because they're in some sort of a government building or civic center. And then I'm pretty positive that Crestview is going to open there as backup in July as well. So I think, everybody wants to rock and roll and get back in to normal, get past the hype and all the other stuff that's gone on along with this thing.
Dan: Gotcha. Oh, by the way, if anybody's listening, they don't know, Vince Mayfield is the chairman of the board for the Greater Fort Walton Beach Chamber of Commerce this year. That's why we're asking Vince about that.
Vince: Yeah. I think the chamber has been doing a lot of things to try to make sure that we keep our business community informed in terms of what's going on. As you know, we've done some videos to help the small business understand what's available to them, to the PPP loans, the Idle loans through the SBA. And of course the Florida Instant Disaster loans that were initially given out. So all through this, we've been working with the County and we've been working with the cities and try to make sure that we keep our business community informed and help them get back to normal as quickly as possible. Get the aid and things that are necessary for them to sustain operations in the wake of COVID-19.
Dan: The Great Fort Walton Beach Chamber of Commerce has been very instrumental in getting a lot of information out to people just through their website. But Vince, I'm going to ask you to change hats now. It's time for us to get into the Bit-Wizard's tip of the one part of the show.
Announcer: Bit-Wizards bits and bites.
Vince: So in keeping with the current COVID-19 theme, we wanted to kind of make people aware that Apple and Google have implemented what's called contact tracing for COVID-19. And so they've quietly and ambitiously rolled out the new COVID-19 contact tracing technology that will send you a notification if you're near someone who has the coronavirus. So in effect, what they've done is they've turned every smart phone on the planet into a tool for tracking COVID-19. Apple and Google, they pushed up the new software to people's smartphones automatically this month, and it's meant to be incorporated and use with COVID-19 apps that are developed by the government and health agencies across the globe. And that software, what it does is, it uses contract tracing software will use the Bluetooth to detect other smartphones in close proximity and alert people if they come in contact with someone who's tested positive.
Sam: So the way that works is that everyone's phone has Bluetooth built in on it now. And over 99% of all phones out there, smartphones are either running Apple, iOS or Android OS. The Apple is only one who makes I-phones running their operating system, but there are a lot of different manufacturers running the Android operating system. But when it comes down to it, there's really only two big players in that game. And strange times make for strange bedfellows. And so Apple and Google who've typically been against each other or competitors pretty heavily in this space are working together because they figure, hey, if we've got really only two operating systems that we have to figure out here. And every phone has Bluetooth and every Bluetooth device sort of announces itself. So when you first set up your Bluetooth speaker at home, it's going to talk to your phone and announce who ... They talk to each other and do a little bit of a little bit of a handshake and a communication. And what they're looking at doing here is using that capability across our phones, so that if you walk past someone, it won't identify anything other than the two Bluetooth points on each of your phones will recognize that you walk within, I don't know, let's say six feet of each other, and they'll just acknowledge that. And what it'll do is keep a history and a log of the addresses of these different Bluetooth devices that it's interacted with and come in contact with as you walk around. Then if one person in that chain somewhere, tests positive for COVID-19, then it's able to identify the other people that have come into contact. And that way they can try to map out who has transmitted to whom, and who's gotten too, too close to other people, and who may have then been put at risk because of somebody who had it. May have been unaware and wandering around talking to people.
Dan: That sounds-
Vince: So the experts, they **inaudible** technology hurdles like any new technology or obstacles that come out. One is they want to minimize the number of false positives. So smart phones can detect Bluetooth signals through walls and from far away, but it's not really clear how the apps that will use this software will rule out those interactions. And another thing is verifying somebody's COVID-19 status to prevent trolls or misinformed people from falsely claiming that they have the virus, which in turn creates panic and scare. So even more eventful impact is limiting the scale of testing, which can mean that many unreported cases of COVID-19 would go out there. So just to kind of give people an idea of what Google and Android have done is, they have created an application programming interface that allows other applications to utilize that fundamental blocks of code that are built into the operating system of Android and iPhone systems. And so that's why it requires that you have an app. If you're like me and you're a little skeptical about some of this stuff, and you're worried about privacy and other things, well, you don't have to worry about that because both applications, both the Android and Google platform, sorry, the Google and the iPhone platforms or iOS platforms have the ability for you to turn off these settings within your phone. When they're downloaded with the latest updates, they are automatically off. However, the other thing that you can do is to make sure that you don't install any tracking applications on your phone that will utilize that technology because what they will do is when you install them, they will prompt you and ask you if you would like to enable the settings and then that will enable that contact tracing. So for those of you that worry about privacy and stuff like that like me, and the misuse of this particular technology, you have the ability to turn it off. For those of you that want to put your hands in government and let you provide a service of giving them information about where you're at and who you're in contact with, you can enable this technology by downloading one of those apps, and then also allowing it to enable it on your smartphone.
Dan: Vince, I'm going to just kind of step in because, we've heard about this coming. A lot of people were concerned that the government would maybe like you're talking about with your privacy, you wouldn't want them to know every single move that you made. And so I think people will be apprehensive that are thinking like you are. Others may be fine with it, but I'll also add this. If you do contract the virus and you're over and done with, you're completely over this, is there a way for them to go back in and erase your name from being a positive for the virus?
Vince: Yes. So the system is designed specifically to keep accuracy. So if you are not positive for it, they want that to also propagate through the system as quickly as possible. And of course, everyone should be absolutely right to be extremely concerned about the technology. Because we see it in movies like in the Batman movie where they developed that software that hacked into everybody's phone so it could keep track of where everybody was. I think it was in one of the Fast & Furious movies. They had that God's eye software. And the reason why is because there's a lot of power behind large amounts of data like this. Facebook has built an entire platform just based on figuring out the connections between people. And so there are famous stories of Facebook suggesting that you might want to be friends with this person. And the reason they figured it out is because they knew that your location, because of the Facebook app on your phone happened to be at the same location as somebody else who has Facebook on their phone, and that you have six friends in common. And so they will suggest and say, Oh, hey, we think you should be friends with this. And your thought is, Oh, what a coincidence? I just saw that person the other day at the store. But it wasn't a coincidence at all. And so the privacy concerns around this are very important. I know Apple takes these privacy concerns very seriously. I think Google does as well. Nobody wants to open up their platform for people to abuse this. But specifically in this instance, they are working together to figure out ways to maintain security as much as possible so that you are not handing over just all of your information to a bad actor. Whether that's a government state actor, or a malicious hackers that could ... Imagine the damage you could do with an app like this. If you could somehow hack into this system and track every single person that's come into contact with every other person and have it notify people if someone they don't like [crosstalk 00:11:31]-
Sam: Imagine if you're a prominent CEO of a publicly traded company and they're able to hack in and say that you contracted the virus, what would that do to the stock prices?
Vince: Yep.
Sam: Or if it could ... There's a lot of things could be done. I think the biggest thing that I'm concerned about right now about this type of technology and the way that it's done, and it's nothing new about the technology. What they've done is they've sort of put it all together in order to utilize it for a specific purpose. But I'm worried about a rogue governor. Like the one up in Michigan that would nefariously use this in a way that limits our constitutional freedoms and basically puts things in place that are over-hyped or that would potentially ruin people's lives. I know that there's people that don't feel that way, but to me, if you can't tell I've got coronavirus fatigue, I'm sick of this whole thing. And this is just another one of these things that has perpetrated into our society that they're allegedly calling the new normal going forward. And I don't accept it as a new normal. I accept it as a condition that's happened right now. And after that, we need to move forward with our lives normally.
Dan: Yeah. Don't you think, honestly, sometimes this is just an opportunity for someone to push this type of a system?
Sam: Well, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I do believe that there are things like this that people sometimes misuse. When you start to erode on freedoms, then over time, they take a little bit, and then a little bit more then a little bit more then a little bit more. And before it, you are an oppressed people.
Vince: I know that already some of this technology is being used in government. I know that the departments of transportation are able to track the movement of vehicles on the highway systems, because every car has a radio in it that has a Bluetooth transmitter. That's where you can hook up your phone to the stereo and listen to Pandora while you're driving. Since all of these devices have this Bluetooth radio inside your car stereo, that is also broadcasting a signal and it's identifier. And so certain departments of transportation within the country are already setting up Bluetooth readers so they can see when a car gets onto an interstate and when it gets off again, and they're able to ID that car, not by the people within it or anything like that. They're just able to ID this as a unique object that happened to get on the interstate at this exit and got off 17 miles down the road at this other exit, because the Bluetooth transmitter in the car was broadcasting as it went past the sensor. And so they are able to track movement using the Bluetooth already. Of course, you can change that by turning off Bluetooth in your car, or by not even opting into contact tracing app on your phone.
Sam: And seeing the positive impact that you can look and monitor traffic patterns and things that are going on. Imagine if they take that the next step further and they actually monitor, and they tack it back to your particular license plate, and they automatically issue speeding tickets. Which you may or may not be driving. And then you have no way to face your accuser. That to me is one of these things that potentially could erode against people's freedoms. And so those types of things really concern me as we move forward. I'm a pro-technology guy, but when you see things like this, it makes me wonder about how it's going to be misused, how it's going to be regulated and how it's going to be controlled.
Dan: Gosh, you guys stay on top of everything. So Bit-Wizards, even if you're just a client for managed IT services, apparently your clients can call in or they can contact you and say, hey, you guys are pretty much on top of all this technology, what do you think about this? And you guys can kind of keep them updated on what the good and bad of each one of these types of apps.
Vince: I would say that's one of the primary reasons we do this radio show on Tuesday mornings. On our website, bitwizards.com, we have a section we call thought leadership. And this is actually the radio show archives are on that part of our website also. Because we do spend a lot of time staying on top of this information. Learning about it, understanding the technology behind it. In many times, we're part of developing technology solutions that involve a lot of these new technologies coming out. So it behooves us to stay on top of it. But then we want to make sure that our client base has access to this knowledge as well. So that's why we post a lot of this on our website, through videos, blog, posts, articles, radio show, episodes, podcasts.
Dan: You guys are all over it. All right, guys. [ crosstalk 00:00:16:09].
Vince: Let's take this thing to our next segment.
Dan: Yeah. I was going to say it's time for our next segment.
Announcer: Bit-Wizards. What's up our sleeve, What's up our sleeve?
Sam: So today we're going to talk about digitally transforming your business to operate from your smartphone. And it's a word we hear a lot right now, or a phrase is, digital transformation. And what is digital transformation? Well, that's the process of using new digital technologies to create or to modify existing business processes and a culture and your customer experiences to meet the changing business and market requirements. So this reimagining of business in a digital age is called digital transformation. It's taking existing technology you have, or looking at new opportunities and saying, how can we not just change the technology, but how can we change our business as a whole to match the market and the new requirements that are coming out. So in effect, you're pivoting your business to leverage the latest information, the technology and systems have that can make your business better.
Vince: So some examples of that that are kind of interesting is, with kayak. com. So they have basically happy customers with zero service staff. So they use a do it yourself online database to keep millions of users happy without employing a single customer service representative.
Dan: Pretty amazing.
Vince: It is. And then they actually implement artificial intelligence that actually learns based upon the customer questions and things like that to offer them up suggestions or things that would help them resolve questions and things like that on their own, making it totally self service. Another one that you might consider would be Lloyd's Construction in Egan, Michigan, in which they are running their entire business from smartphones. Now that might not seem as if it needs flashy phone software, but this $9 million a year demolition business and carting company has been run by the same family for the last 24 years. And so what they do is they take down commercial, residential buildings and then haul them away. And so what they did was they were doing this office and spreadsheets and trying to do it using radios and a bunch of other things. And they turned around, they implemented cellular technology and smartphones, and they combined that with mobile software that helps them track equipment, accounts, and even employee lunch breaks and their time. And actually allowed them to deliver a better service for their customers at a lower cost point, actually making the company more profitable. It also allowed them to do and implement jobs quicker and faster. So-
Dan: Looks like better efficiency as well.
Vince: Absolutely. And so that's what digital transformation is all about. So, Sam probably, talk to you here a little bit about how to you implement digital transformation?
Sam: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, if I can even plug Bit-Wizards a little bit, we ourselves have been part of this digital transformation of allowing companies to shift to mobile and become more productive. I think of a lumberyard that we worked with here here in the South, that we were able to really revolutionize a lot of the process they have for when Lumber's coming into the yard, going out of the yard, being processed in the yard. And we were able to basically allow the entire staff to do everything they were doing off of mobile phones.
Vince: So that was Rex Lumber and graceful.
Sam: That's right.
Vince: They also have offices in Troy and Brookhaven and two or three other locations now. But they were actually able to process more trucks in a single day than they had in the past, based upon the software that we put together, utilizing RFID and cameras. They also are able to make it more accurate and they actually saved themselves money and cut down on what you might call shrinkage or fraud with the way that logs and things like that come into the operation.
Sam: And you got to figure logging is about one of the oldest institutions out there in terms of businesses. Of cutting down trees for the wood. This has been happening for probably more than 50 years that people have been doing this, cutting down trees for the wood. And so you would think, you know what? We've got a system that works. We've been doing this for centuries. Don't worry about it. We cut down wood, we label it, we track it, we send it out the door. But by able to do this, we were able to then give them something where they're carrying around in their phone, in their pocket and being able to do this. And I think a good question to start asking for digital transformation is, where are we wasting the most amount of time? So for kayak. com, I bet you that they could account for 70% of all the time they spend on customer service support is on these three questions that customers always call in and ask. I can't find my booking number, or I can't remember which flight I'm leaving with. Whatever those questions, I wouldn't know. But they were able to identify those and say, how can we build a digital system that will answer those questions and eliminate that 60, 70, 80% of the time we're wasting that we could be spending that time somewhere else, improving our processes. It's a good way for your organization to think about the time that just seems like busy work the time. That seems like it's just getting wasted and it's the same thing over and over. And then say how can we bring in a technological partner? Someone liked Bit-Wizard come in and help us do the digital transformation method in here. And so we have some ways that we do that. But just a short list of this is number one, you've got to stay up to date. If you're trying to patch in an old Windows 98 system, because what, it worked back in 98, I don't see why it won't work now. I worked with a company locally this week that is running a 2008 Mac server and they were having issues getting it connected to the network. And I was not surprised they were having issues because technology has changed so much since 2008, but their business relies on it. The second thing I would say is get help. You need someone that can be your CIO, your Chief Information Officer that can help you stay on top of the technology and guide you in the right direction. And that often comes in the form of managed services of outsourcing the IT portion of your business. And then come up with a digital transformation strategy together.
Vince: You want to make sure that you map out what it is that you want to do, and you want to execute on that strategy iteratively and incrementally. There's no mystic magic to digital transformation. It's about constantly working and improving your business, utilizing technology and staying ahead of the trends that are coming out there so that you can service your customers better. So it's about making small incremental changes, rather than broad sweeping changes, and managing that organizational change. Managing that organizational change is the hardest part of the whole thing.
Sam: Absolutely. When I worked for a radio station in the early 2, 000s we would go through just tons and tons of fax paper, because everyone would fax in their PSA for us to put on the air.
Dan: Oh yeah.
Sam: And so by converting us to a digital fax system that basically went into an inbox, instead of printing out on that thermal paper, we were able to save, I don't know, several thousand dollars a month just across our station. So that's an easy way of doing digital transformation. But one thing I will say about it is to execute it iteratively. Don't do one big fell swoop, we're going to change everything right out of the gate. Instead to do small incremental processes that improve on the last process. We do this continually. We're transforming our customer's daily business through managed it and this incremental improvement strategy. And so we provide virtual CIO services for all of our clients. Even lean and mean, and up to date while also looking for ways to improve them strategically.
Dan: Yep.
Vince: That kind of leads into our next segment there Dan-
Dan: All right.
Vince: Which is-
Announcer: Bit-Wizards from the spell book.
Vince: So each week we try to demystify some technological geek speak, or we discuss a little technological factoy. But today's term, we want to tie into what we've been talking about digital transformation. And that term is agile. And agile is a set of principles or behaviors and our approaches to delivering work in an iterative fashion. It allows teams to deliver value quickly and often and it's often used in software development, but it's also used in organizational changes like in digital transformation. And digital transformation itself can refer to anything from IT modernization, for example, cloud computing, to digital optimization or the invention of new business models. Thus the term is more like digitization, than digital business transformation. So at Bit-Wizards, we understand that technology is a tool to help your business and help you be more efficient and to better serve your customers. So we're here all the time, ready to help you understand what you need to know to effectively apply technology within your business. As you've heard me say on this show before today, every business is a technology business, and you need someone to help you stay at the tip of the sphere, not just at the bleeding edge. So it's the managed IT service that we have here. That's a perfect way to go with our virtual CIO service.
Dan: Yeah. **crosstalk** about you guys, you guys really and truly can marry up a business with the IT that's required to push that business farther. So you're not just IT guys, you're also business people as well. You understand business. And so you can help a business project their business with more efficiency and create more business and probably a lot more profit just by understanding their business somewhat and applying the technology with managed IT service. You guys always amazed me when you talk about these different businesses that you help.
Sam: Yeah, absolutely. We're big believers in this agile methodology of implementing change in incremental amounts so that you don't get change fatigue within the organization. Or people getting frustrated, your employees. People are not typically big fans of change, but at the same time, we know that change is inevitable. And so even just in the last few weeks, we've taken one of our clients, a large steel manufacturing organization and started moving their system, a system that's been in place for 10, 15 years for them. So it has a lot of legacy crust in there. Just a lot of processes that someone knows and nobody else knows how that works and we all trust this old guy to not get hit by a bus on the way to work. Otherwise we won't be able to keep functioning. And so in those places, those are the instances where we come in and we do that digital transformation, but we do it in this agile methodology to help them.
Dan: Okay, guys, this is about the time of the show where if you would like to, you can put a plugin for one of your customers, some appreciation for one of them.
Sam: Absolutely. I want to give a Bit-Wizards thank you and a shout out to our customer, The Emerald Coast Regional Council. If you've been around in the area for a long time, you may know them by their old name from a couple of years ago, they were the West Florida Regional Planning Council. Now they're the Emerald Coast Regional Council, and they provide a transportation planning, economic development, emergency planning, environmental planning, housing strategy, and land use planning in our area specifically. And Bit-Wizards provides managed IT services for ECRC. And we work so closely with Renee over there, the head of HR and Austin, the CEO over there. And we want to thank them and their entire team for allowing Bit-Wizards to serve them as they grow up and down the Emerald coast. They are growing and we are proud to be a part of this growth that's happening at ECRC right now.
Dan: And earlier I think I cut you off Vince. I'm sorry, buddy.
Vince: Oh, no, no, it's all good. I was just going to say is like the Emerald Coast Regional Planning Council, whether you're a small business or you're a large business, Bit-Wizards can help you do this. We work with large Fortune 500 companies. We're actually helping Mitsubishi go through a digital transformation right now. We've worked with Stein Martin Bell's. But then we also work with local companies like TSA consulting group. West Porter Regional Planning Council and Lisa, Joe Spencer, Attorney at law. We had the capability large and small in order to help customers make that digital transformation and transform their business and make their business better so that they can get more customers, achieve higher profits. It doesn't matter whether you're a lifestyle business or whether you are a company that wants to do high growth, we can help you.
Dan: Absolutely. Thanks guys for coming out. We're about out of time, but I'm looking forward to the next Tuesday for Bit-Wizards tip of the wand. Take care, have a wonderful week.
Vince: Thanks Dan.