Title text for Heavy Strategy episode HS066

HS066: The Holy Grail: A Functioning Tech Strategy

Greg
Ferro

Johna Till
Johnson

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It’s rare for strategists, executives, and technologists to all get on the same page in order to create, execute, and adjust an organization’s tech strategy, much less do it well. But it is possible. Johna and Greg discuss their experiences of seeing through some consultants’ smoke and mirrors, honestly evaluating an organization’s capability to implement a strategy, and arguing in meetings (mostly Greg).

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Episode Transcript

This episode was transcribed by AI and lightly formatted. We make these transcripts available to help with content accessibility and searchability but we can’t guarantee accuracy. There are likely to be errors and inaccuracies in the transcription.

Johna Till Johnson (00:00:02) – Hi, I’m Johna Till Johnson, CEO of Nemertes Research, and I’m here with my co-host Greg Ferro, who is the co-founder of Packet Pushers. And you are listening to Heavy Strategy, the show that gives you the right questions, not the right answers. On today’s show, we’re planning to talk about strategies and in particular, what a technology strategy team should focus on. Greg and I have some differing opinions, so this should be a lively and interesting episode.

Greg Ferro(00:00:44) – Johna is the consultant. I’m the consumer. More of my cynicism knows no bounds on vendor consulting and industry consulting. So let’s see how we go.

Johna Till Johnson (00:00:52) – Well, I don’t know quite what the difference is between vendor consulting and industry consulting, but it is the case that most of my clients are enterprise organizations where your alignments lie.

Greg Ferro(00:01:01) – Like every vendor engagement is sales aligned.

Greg Ferro(00:01:03) – So if you hire consultants from a vendor, it’ll always end up saying buy more of our products. Yeah, but an industry consultant is at worst limited to buy more of my time. But at least they are nominally independent of external influences like, say, selling a particular product or aligning to a particular technology.

Johna Till Johnson (00:01:20) – Yeah. And under that definition, we’re both industry consultants. But I think we take a slightly different perspective. Greg, you said, you know, you think of things as bottom up with me coming in top down, which I think is a legit characterization. I’ll kick off since I know you want to poke holes in my architecture here or my framework, but I like to think about a technology strategy team focus as good, better, best. So good is sitting down and asking yourselves the question, what’s our overall goal with it? What are we trying to accomplish? What technologies do we want to deploy? When? What selection criteria are we going to use to choose technologies downstream? And how is this possibly aligning with what the business is trying to do? So we’re not pulling all this out of the air because we feel like doing it.

Johna Till Johnson (00:02:07) – That’s good. Better is to sit down and say all of that. Plus what is going on in technology trends, how are things changing that might change our strategy so that even though we are committed to technology X for the next couple of years, technology Y is is coming along in the shadows and is probably going to supersede it. And we need to have our plans in place to move to technology Y. And I would say the best focus is to do all of that, plus an alignment with corporate strategy going forward. So there’s alignment with corporate business drivers today, which is a different thing. So if we say, well, we want to align our technology strategy with what the business is doing, that’s great. The difference is you want to align your technology strategy with that and what the business is going to do 3 to 5 years from now, which is tricky to figure out. So what do you think, Greg.

Greg Ferro(00:02:59) – We often talk about in enterprise, is that we have a strategy. And I think the gap is quite often strategies are not well understood.

Greg Ferro(00:03:06) – So when you look at it from the practitioner level on the ground, it tends to be difficult to take an abstracted strategy of like, we’re going to be a business that does, you know, uses our IT to accelerate our sales strategy and to break that down into we’re going to move to virtualization and network overlay so that we can improve the speed of delivery of service. Right. And so the biggest challenge that I’ve always found when you start talking about technology strategy is addressing how does this message, which comes at a high level from a strategy consultant, turn into something actionable down on the ground? I’m very cynical about it because I’ve seen so many consultants engagement founder on the realities. That is right. The executives are talking about one thing, and then the people are talking about something down the bottom.

Johna Till Johnson (00:03:52) – Well, let’s talk about the ways that that can founder, because I think we had a kind of a lively discussion prepping for this. And I think you itemized a handful of ways that that beautiful, good, better, best strategy can just crash and burn when it hits reality.

Johna Till Johnson (00:04:05) – From your perspective, what are some of the ways that strategy goes south?

Greg Ferro(00:04:09) – I think there’s a few things. One is I’ve worked as an advisor to or been on the opposing side of, like on the client side of, say, KPMG or Bain, you know, some mega consulting. Now they are strategy.

Johna Till Johnson (00:04:21) – I always love to bash those guys.

Greg Ferro(00:04:22) – So yeah. Oh Gartner is another one right. Thank you.

Johna Till Johnson (00:04:25) – Let’s bash them.

Greg Ferro(00:04:26) – But you know and they come in at a very high level. And they tend to waft around with power slides with all of this power, you know, strange language that has no reality. It’s like, you know, we could improve efficiency 20% by business process re-engineering. Well, yeah. Or value.

Johna Till Johnson (00:04:42) – Realization is another one of my favorites.

Greg Ferro(00:04:44) – Market acceleration and things like this. So the challenge that I’ve always had is when I’m sitting there is to say to these people, break that down into actionable. And that’s very disruptive. And I’ve actually been very unpopular to certain people because I say like, that’s okay, that’s great.

Greg Ferro(00:04:59) – That sounds wonderful. And yes, from a business. I agree with you that you know, we need to accelerate business and improve sales and deliver services faster, but what you’re not addressing is how we move those intentions into actionable. And so if you’re going to make a technology strategy and call it a technology strategy, it actually has to include some physical instantiation of actionable things. So if your technology strategy just says make business faster, move for markets, reduce the cost of it, accelerate, move to a five.

Johna Till Johnson (00:05:29) – I’m going to jump in and say, you’re just elaborating on what I defined as a good basic strategy, because a good basic strategy, as I said at the beginning, is what are we going to do when you have to start by saying, what do we do when? Or you have to at least get there? I agree that you can start with something fluffy like. Our technology strategy is to deploy the technologies that empower our salespeople to sell more. Great. The next question is what does that mean? What are we going to do when when.

Greg Ferro(00:05:54) – Somebody comes in and says, oh, we’re going to roll out SAP onto VMware, you know, or maybe we’re going to deploy SAP on SUSE Linux instead of using VMware. That’s a very common one, right? Because SAP acquired SUSE. So you want to run it on that platform because then you’ve got a stack of infrastructure that SAP likes, for example. And same applies with Oracle or whoever’s software you’re using. They’ll mandate a stack. Right. And you might have to adapt to that. The challenge here is that then you’ve got an actionable project. You’ve got an ideal sized gap. If you want to do it that way, you’ve got a scope that you can create and say, migrate from this to this so that we can achieve that part of the strategy. But the challenge is always, if I’m migrating SAP from this infrastructure to this infrastructure, sometimes we lose sight of the why we’re doing that. Right. Is it just to comply with SAP’s requirements? Is it to improve the speed of SAP? Is it to enable new modules for SAP? Is it to, you know, get better pricing from SAP? If all of those things are actually abstractions from the technology work that happens at the bottom.

Greg Ferro(00:06:54) – But the challenge is with the technology strategy, you say, like, we’re going to do this move, we’re going to move this product from here to here. But here’s why. How do we not lose sight of that?

Johna Till Johnson (00:07:03) – I’m going to treat that as a rhetorical question, but I agree that one of the, you know, we talk about the right questions or the questions you should be asking. I think one of the big questions should always be after you’ve set your strategy, why are we doing everything that we’re doing? And if there’s anything you’re doing for a reason that’s not part of the strategy, then you need to second, third, fourth time revisit it. And either one of two things is the case. Either your strategy is not sufficiently comprehensive, and other words you might be doing something to reduce technical debt, for example. And if reducing technical debt isn’t part of your strategy, then you run into a problem where what you’re telling people you’re doing does not align with what you’re doing because you’re doing stuff in the background, like reducing technical debt that you haven’t pulled to the foreground and said, hey, business, this is a thing that is important and that we need to be investing in, which is reduction of technical debt.

Johna Till Johnson (00:07:54) – So I think boiling all that down, ask yourself always, why am I doing this? And be open to the answer that it’s sort of like, because I didn’t really ask myself this question before, and maybe it should be something we don’t do.

Greg Ferro(00:08:05) – And I think that’s always the hardest part about technology strategies is that this is where you start, and then the middle and in the middle you get focused on the things that you’re executing. And then when you get to the end, you’ve forgotten the reason why you started in the first place.

Johna Till Johnson (00:08:17) – Well, I would say actually, since the topic here is what should your technology strategy team focus on? I think one of the things you need to focus on is why you’re doing anything. And that should be not just at the beginning, the middle and the end, but it should be throughout every day when you get up, you know, as you start your work, why am I doing this? What initiative is this in support of? And does this initiative actually align with the strategy, the way we set it? Because another point that I think you wanted to make is that strategies necessarily must be mutable.

Johna Till Johnson (00:08:47) – They have to be able to change in response to business conditions. And so sometimes I get pushback that says, well, this was our strategy. But now the business has changed their business strategy. And our strategy is no longer aligned with a business strategy. And the answer to that is, okay, fix it. Like things do change. Get over it.

Greg Ferro(00:09:06) – No one survives the first engagement. Exactly sort of thing. And I love the way that you said mutable, which is a big consulting word. Yeah, and I said adaptive.

Johna Till Johnson (00:09:14) – Also a big consulting word, Greg.

Greg Ferro(00:09:16) – Yeah, but a little bit more practical than mutable.

Johna Till Johnson (00:09:19) – Mutable actually means changeable. Adaptive means changing in response to. But they’re both accurate consulting words.

Greg Ferro(00:09:24) – Interesting. Just as an aside, I’ve sat in so many meetings with consultants and there are consultants who use babble. You know, they talk about we want to create a hyperactive marketing agile opportunity or, you know, we want to move with the acceleration of the speed of light, you know, business at the speed of light.

Greg Ferro(00:09:39) – And it’s just an instant turnoff because it’s so obviously just if you’re working in a marketing team or a PR firm, then, you know, coming up with that sort of bloviating is absolutely fine. It’s in keeping. But to stand in front of a technologist and use that sort of waffle words, it’s going to lose you.

Johna Till Johnson (00:09:54) – That’s actually why when we win business, a lot of times it’s because we explain things in language that ordinary people and by ordinary people. Well, I mean, people who actually accomplish stuff need to understand. And as you’re talking about that, I remember getting into a huge challenge. Let me put it that way with the CIO at a client who just never could get below the surface of the consultant babble. And so she was always talking about, well, our mobility strategy is to enable and, you know, blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, yeah, but what does that mean? I mean, you couldn’t even get to a very simple question like, hey, are you doing BYoD or not? Like, you couldn’t answer that question.

Johna Till Johnson (00:10:33) – And I think that’s probably another thing to to ask yourself if you’re stuck with a consultant that’s bloviating, or your senior management has bought into the jargon du jour, I think you need to ask yourself the question of can I answer based on what they’re saying? Can I use their statement to answer a simple question like BYoD yes or no?

Greg Ferro(00:10:56) – It’s time to engage the cover your ass strategy and, you know, document your responses to these issues in writing, not sit in meetings and fight back. Well, I used to do that in meetings. I used to push back on these things in meetings and say, give me actionable items out of this because I can’t. And they’d say, well, that’s your job. And I’d be looking at them going, you’re the £2,000 a day consultant brought in to produce the strategy, but you’re not giving me an actionable strategy. You’re giving me.

Johna Till Johnson (00:11:22) – Exactly. So I think, I think one of the questions you should ask is, you know, whether whatever strategic initiatives you’re undertaking, whether it’s yip yapping in a meeting, whether it’s sketching on a whiteboard, whether it’s working on, you know, PowerPoint, you should ask yourself, is the end result of this going to be something that’s clearly actionable and helping me make decisions in a concrete way.

Greg Ferro(00:11:43) – Or is it something I can feed into a project plan, you know, or sit down in a project review and say, we’re sitting here with 20 million in budget, and the strategy now says, we’re going in this direction. I can allocate 2 million in budget to this actionable. Exactly.

Johna Till Johnson (00:11:58) – The end result of any strategic plan that we build for a client is always spend money here. And what’s interesting is it’s often not spend money with this particular vendor. It’s by a vendor in this category or service in this category, which is another thing that I know is one of your hot buttons. Greg, you always talk about how like one of your examples is people may say, oh, my strategy is to virtualize. And yet they internalize this as buy VMware and put it everywhere.

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Greg Ferro(00:13:07) – Yeah, that’s right. And that’s always the challenge because once you get from a technology strategy, then you get to the technology execution and we start talking about, oh, our product strategy or our implementation strategy is that we choose VMware when we want virtualization. And that is perfectly valid. That is fine to say we are going to own it. And this is one of the interesting things. What we’re seeing in the market at the moment is companies like AWS and Azure and Google are downsizing, and the build out, you know, the money that the free money, the fountain of money that was available for them to just build out. So and the reason for that is in part is because up until now, they’ve run these small teams. So AWS talks about the two pizza teams, and it turns out that every team inside of AWS has to have, say, a database expert and a front end expert.

Greg Ferro(00:13:50) – And so now you’ve got a company with thousands and thousands of people with the same skill, all doing the same work over and over and over. And that is exactly what enterprise it was set up to establish 30 years ago. Right. Because that wasn’t.

Johna Till Johnson (00:14:04) – Sustainable. That wasn’t going to work. Right? That’s right.

Greg Ferro(00:14:07) – AWS has this situation now where it has thousands of different ways of consuming many different types of databases. This is just internally, by the way. This isn’t externally. Yes, it’s doing it. But every team now has to be able to have a database person who can speak five different databases, and that’s a skill. It would make much more sense to have a centralized pool of database devs, you know, or a centralized pool or front end or a centralized pool of web developers or, you know, whatever.

Johna Till Johnson (00:14:33) – It is all true, Greg, but I think you’re wandering off into…

Greg Ferro(00:14:36) – I am. I do think it’s a useful case study, because AWS had a strategy which said every team will have its own skills.

Johna Till Johnson (00:14:41) – It’s not a strategy, though, that has nothing to do with the strategy. That is an operational directive.

Greg Ferro(00:14:46) – Operational strategy, in my opinion.

Johna Till Johnson (00:14:48) – No that’s not a strategy. That’s a directive. Because if I say, you know, Johna will do X, that’s a directive. The strategy is when you say Johna is doing X in support of Y. And the reason we’re doing this, a Z. And here is the. Concrete connection between what Joanna is doing and the downstream result. And so every team is going to look like this no matter what this is, is not a strategy, it’s just an operational directive.

Greg Ferro(00:15:13) – So you come at this from more of a top down view. And I’ve often done this from a bottom up perspective. So my engagement with strategy was often in an unusual way. I would be hired as a subject matter expert or.

Johna Till Johnson (00:15:24) – And then you’d run head on into flawed strategy or improperly executed strategy, which is kind of what I wanted to. Zero zero.

Johna Till Johnson (00:15:31) – Yeah. And circle back.

Greg Ferro(00:15:32) – And then I would bubble up from the bottom and say, well, you’re asking me to I’m unclear on what you’re asking. You’ve just told me something.

Johna Till Johnson (00:15:38) – I don’t have a strategy. Yeah.

Greg Ferro(00:15:40) – And then I would be involved in some sort of strategic consulting because then I’d say, well, if that’s your strategic statement, here’s what my interpretation of that is. And then we’d end up looping around, converging on how do I extract something out of that strategy statement.

Johna Till Johnson (00:15:52) – But I do want to really hone in on that key point, which is a strategy is not we will implement vendor X. A strategy is we will implement a product of type X. And by the way, we’ve conducted an assessment and we have decided that vendor X is the one that best fits for now. And I think that’s one of the biggest mistakes that enterprise organizations make is they conflate the strategy with the vendor with the product. It shouldn’t I mean, your strategy may be we have decided that we are going to abrogate our decision making in a particular area and simply follow the strategy by our strategic vendor, and we’re doing that to save time and energy or for some other y reason that’s legit.

Johna Till Johnson (00:16:35) – But it’s not legit to say, as you said earlier, the case in point, our strategy is to virtualize therefore VMware everywhere. That therefore does not apply.

Greg Ferro(00:16:44) – Yes. And this is where vendor consulting comes in. If you have decided then to implement a VMware or a Cisco network or a Juniper network or a HPE, you know.

Johna Till Johnson (00:16:54) – HPE now Juniper.

Greg Ferro(00:16:56) – Yes I know, HPE and Juniper and or an IBM or whatever. That’s where the vendor consulting can be valuable is because then you hire someone who’s a subject matter expert in that vendor to come and advise you on which products from their portfolio to select. But the mistake that I’ve seen so many companies make is to hire the vendor consulting to set the IT strategy that is not aligning customer needs. The customer does not need to buy more equipment, which is the goal of the vendor consultant. That’s why vendors have consultants is to sell more. They’re a sales tool. Right? Right.

Johna Till Johnson (00:17:28) – Absolutely. And they usually I mean, there’s a major vendor who shall remain nameless, uh, who had a really wonderful team of high level strategic consultants that actually were brilliant at what they did and didn’t make any of the consulting mistakes.

Johna Till Johnson (00:17:40) – And then the vendor decided they were so brilliant that they got folded under the sales team and compensated by the sales team. Interestingly enough, the best and brightest quit. They were like, I’m not doing this. I can’t work in the client’s best interest. If you’re telling me my goal is to sell more of our stuff.

Greg Ferro(00:17:56) – So many times, the consulting is then aligned to marketing or to sales because the budget internal budgets right. This whole modern concept of, you know, once upon a time you’re consulting team would have been independent, a profit center in its own right. But it’s very difficult to make a profit from consulting, as you know. Right? Right. You’re never going to get rich running a consulting business as a general rule.

Johna Till Johnson (00:18:16) – Or if you do, you have to do it with, you know, smoke and mirrors. And without naming names, you named them earlier. I’ll let you do that. But a lot of those companies do, in fact, have an awful lot of smoke and mirrors, and people buy smoke and mirrors.

Greg Ferro(00:18:29) – Consulting nearly always ends up at some point hide under sales or marketing because of modern budgets. Somebody has to pay for them and they don’t want to. You know, if you’ve got a team and so many of the modern businesses like have to return 40% gross margin to the bottom line, but a professional services team will never.

Johna Till Johnson (00:18:46) – Never does that, that.

Greg Ferro(00:18:47) – It’s going to return 20% gross.

Johna Till Johnson (00:18:49) – Your single biggest cost is also a very high cost. You’re not going to be able to shove that down. All the people try, but that’s also sort of a little bit of a side note. I think coming back to this.

Greg Ferro(00:18:58) – Important when you talk about technology consulting, well, strategy consulting, that you do understand the financials of it.

Johna Till Johnson (00:19:03) – Absolutely. But strategy consulting is just a piece of this though. Yes. Um, really the question here is what is your technology internal technology strategy team should be focused on whether…

Greg Ferro(00:19:13) – Let’s go back to strategies or adaptive or or mutable.

Greg Ferro(00:19:15) – The answer there. You know I just wanted to flag this. There’s two things that happen to strategies is people stand there and say it’s written down, and they treat it like it’s some sort of religious text. And it says the Word says this, right, right. And of course it doesn’t. The simple fact is that all religious texts change over time.

Johna Till Johnson (00:19:32) – Shh, don’t tell anyone that.

Greg Ferro(00:19:32) – They’ll bring in rituals from other religion, pagan rituals, or, you know, spiritual, you know, nature, whatever it is. And so you should treat your strategy as the same thing. They can be changed. So look for the key message in the middle of the strategy and say, we agreed to this so that we would achieve this outcome. So keep your eyes open on the bigger picture, right? The classic example here is does AI change your technology strategy.

Johna Till Johnson (00:19:54) – Exactly. And that’s a very fair question. I think any technology can change your technology strategy, but only from the standpoint of does it help us do more of the thing we said we wanted to do in the first place? And if the answer is yes, then yes.

Johna Till Johnson (00:20:07) – And if the answer is no, then no. And in fact, I actually talked to a technologist at a large financial services firm who had a really fantastic innovation process, and she pointed out that essentially they would look at almost any idea. But the first filter for that idea is, is it going to improve our digital customer experience? Because right now, for the next five years, the single biggest thing they were going to invest in was digital customer experience. So if you came up with an idea for infrastructure, you still had to tie it back to improving digital customer experience. If not, they didn’t reject it. They simply said, we will assess that once we’ve achieved our goal of improving digital customer experience, we’ll come back and have a look at that, because it may be valuable in other strategic goals that we set ourselves up, which I think is exactly the right thing to do. You know, it really comes down to ask yourself, why would we want to do this and that? Why has to be tied back to your technology strategy, which has to be tied back to your business strategy.

Greg Ferro(00:21:04) – Now, one thing that struck me here, I’ve used technology strategies from companies to kill projects.

Johna Till Johnson (00:21:10) – Oh, absolutely.

Greg Ferro(00:21:11) – So what you can say is, hang on, this is what we started off with and now we’re executing this. I can’t align these. And it’s been very valuable to have the original and go back to the original intent and say, hang on, we’ve lost our way somewhere. We need to stop.

Johna Till Johnson (00:21:24) – Honestly, I know we’ll talk about this in a later episode, but one of the single biggest values of a technology strategy is it keeps you from going down blind alleys, wasting time and piling up technical debt by buying products or services or solutions that are not aligned with your strategy. It’s a great way to say no. And basically the process is pretty simple. It’s like, does this align with our strategy? No. Do we need to change our strategy? Because remember the strategy is not immutable. If the answer to that is no, then ditch the project and keep the strategy.

Johna Till Johnson (00:21:57) – If the answer is oh crap, our strategy is wrong, then fix the strategy. Yeah, and.

Greg Ferro(00:22:02) – Then it always becomes an argument. Do you stop the project and terminate it, or do you restart the project with some new direction? The last thing I want to talk about before we wrap this up is the other thing is, if you’re living in a this world of being surrounded by strategy and are you headed in the right direction? Also, just remember to have empathy for the people around you or the capability of an organization to follow a strategy is, yeah.

Johna Till Johnson (00:22:22) – That’s what I want to do. Not good. Right?

Greg Ferro(00:22:24) – In my experience, is so many technology people don’t get any training on how to, you know, follow a strategy. And a lot of business people just assume that you know, what the strategy is, and there’s a massive gap there where it’s a part of the communication gap that we talked about, where technologists need to speak business. But if you can speak business enough, and we’ve talked before, that speaking too much business is actually bad for technologists because it takes you away from the core activity.

Greg Ferro(00:22:50) – Right. And so the challenge here is to sit inside of an organization and go, is the organization around me actually able to be capable of following a strategy? And if it’s not, is it your job right. To change that or is it your job just to go, oh well.

Johna Till Johnson (00:23:05) – And actually the ability to execute on a strategy is something that you have to take into consideration. But keep in mind the fact that it can change. So I’ve gone into client scenarios and help them sketch out a strategy. And actually, one of the proudest moments in my life was probably over a decade ago, building out actually quite over a decade ago, building out a technology strategy for which one of the corollary impacts was spend $50,000 on some on a management tool. And I remember walking across the parking lot with the lead engineer who looked at me and said, Johna, you know, nice try. It’s a beautiful strategy. It’s never going to work. I’ve been trying to get this damn tool for ten years.

Johna Till Johnson (00:23:45) – We walked in, the CIO said, oh, we need to buy this tool. For these reasons. Great. Signed off on it and the engineer just looked at me like, you are a magic worker. Okay, I got lucky, but that’s that’s rare. And it’s so rare that I remember it more common. Yesterday I had two conversations with clients. One client came back and said, hey, remember you told us to do these things last year? Well, I just did them. And it was so unusual that I posted that to the team for like a group cheer, because the other client was like, oh, remember those things you told us to do three years ago? Yeah, we still haven’t done them yet.

Greg Ferro(00:24:20) – And life’s like that. As I said, there’s two types of consulting the stuff that, you know, that top down consulting brought in by the senior echelons, that…

Johna Till Johnson (00:24:28) – Stop with this top down and bottom up on this one. Greg, I’m going to push back.

Johna Till Johnson (00:24:31) – I want to highlight the key point here, which is what you said earlier, which is the organization’s ability to execute on a strategy. Okay. And I will say some organizations simply just can’t get out of their own way. And that’s not the fault of the strategy or the strategists or you if you’re the strategy person internally, it’s not your fault, but it is a reality that you have to get your head around, and you have to think about what is possible in the organization and what you can do to push the bounds of possibility if you’re in one of those dysfunctional organizations. It can’t execute to save itself.

Greg Ferro(00:25:03) – Okay, so this is the first in a following series on technology strategies. We’ve got multiple angles that we want to have this discussion. I suspect we may repeat ourselves a little bit, but hopefully the fact that we’re coming in at on different angles might generate better questions so that you can find your own answers. If you’ve been listening and you want to join in the conversation, contact us.

Greg Ferro(00:25:20) – Maybe you are a technology strategist. Join the conversation with us. Just hit us up at packet pushes dot net for you and send us your follow up. Tell us what you think.

Johna Till Johnson (00:25:29) – At Packet Pushers dot net you will also find the Network Break podcast, which helps you stay current on the latest tech news and all that. And there’s a whole lot more at the Packet Pusher site, so please check it out. We are a proud member of the Packet Pushers family. And to wrap up, if you want to reach me, come hit me up at Nemertes.com. That’s where I live. Love to talk to you. You can sign up on our community… fill out the community form, or just drop me a line.

Greg Ferro(00:25:54) – We’ll look forward to seeing you in a couple of weeks.

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