The IT Revolution

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. This episode is a paid partnership with T Mobile for Business. Hello everyone, Malcolm Glabell here today I'm having a special conversation hosted by my good friends at T Mobile for Business about how the digital revolution is going to transform everything about the way we do business. I'm talking to Heather Nelson, the Chief Information Officer at Boston Children's Hospital, Al Lettera, senior vice president of IT at Trackner Supply Company, and Kelly Field, president at T Mobile Business Group, who you may remember, by the way from our episode at the Las Vegas Grand Prix. So you might think, hasn't the digital revolution been happening for a while now, Sure, but it's been unevenly distributed. And the folks at T Mobiles say that thanks to five G, businesses are now able to transform how they do business at scale, which is all these interesting ripple effects, including IT moving from a support role to a leadership role. So I wanted to talk to two brilliant IT leaders who are transforming two radically different worlds, healthcare and retail. Buckle up, because there's a big technological change happening. This conversation is for all the CIOs and business owners who are dreaming up new ways to make things run better. But it's also for everyone who goes to the doctor or shop's retail CALLI and Al and Heather really convinced me that five G is changing just about everything with me is Alaterra you and it for tractor supply. Yes, one of the the grandest, oldest is a tractor supply not far from my home, so I drive by it all the time. And then we have Heather Nelson, and you are the CIO for Boston Children's I am. And then we had the president of t Mobile Business Group, Kelly Field. Kelly, we have done this before. I really look forward to this conversation. Well, I wanted to start with you, Al, and I wanted you to give me a kind of blue sky picture of where you would love to be five years from now, which tract to supply in things digital.

00:02:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, five years from now is really going to be eighteen months from now, so because it's going that fast. But to us as an organization and service of our customers and our team members, it's really going to be a consumer and team member centric strategy that is really taking into consideration, putting everything at the fingertips of the team member and the customer. So it's right there available to them when they're either shopping, their working on their farms, or whether they're working within the communities that they're serving. It's all the information that they need is at their fingertips.

00:03:19
Speaker 1: Heather, do you have a give us a vision.

00:03:21
Speaker 3: Of a vision? I'm going to use one of your phrases.

00:03:24
Speaker 4: We really are at a tipping point with healthcare delivery in the enabling technology. Our patients are consumers and we have to make it easier for patients to come to us. We have to make it easier for physicians care team members to care for those patients. So self service and access will be where we need to focus on. And I know for Boston children it's one of our pillars and our strategic plan is to increase the access and the self service for our patients.

00:03:52
Speaker 1: All you talked about both customers and people who are for protractors. Now you think of this as being a revolutionists equally weighted in those two groups or is it tilt in one direction more than now?

00:04:04
Speaker 3: It's equally weighted.

00:04:06
Speaker 2: You know, the intersection of technology, you know, with the retail industry is not just focused on the customer side, the team member interaction with the customer's paramount to our success. If you go back, we've been in business eighty five plus years. The secret sauce of our businesses is our customer relationship. So the team members are facilitating that and without the right tools, without the right experiences, without the right information, you know, making them more productive, and just giving them access to whatever it is they need to service as customers's paramount to the success of our overall digital strategy.

00:04:42
Speaker 5: I'm just going to jump in and I love working with both of these leaders because they are so customer centric, which I think really resonates with me at Tea Mobile. But I love the call out for the digital transformation impacts the way that you're able to serve your customers and the relationship that you have with them in so many profound ways, especially given AI and where it's taking the need for data and connectivity, but also for your employees in a digital age. A lot of times people ask me, well, why do you need to invest in your employees and or your providers in the same way because everything is self served and digital. I think about like iron Man having Jarvis, you know, you equip them with the technical tools that make them the very best heroes you for your customers. And that's something that I appreciate about that.

00:05:28
Speaker 3: And we want to empower our patients.

00:05:30
Speaker 4: And yes we're a children's hospital, but these kids know technology, they.

00:05:37
Speaker 3: Know how to use iPhones and iPads, and so why not.

00:05:41
Speaker 4: Make sure that they have the tools and the apps to do that at home to do that so that they're empowered and they feel in control of their head.

00:05:49
Speaker 1: Give me, give me a concrete example of something you would like a patient to be able to do that they can't do now.

00:05:57
Speaker 3: I would say any of the of the wearable devices.

00:06:00
Speaker 4: What if we were able to do more home infusions for our cancer patients so they don't have to drive and to come to the hot spital, and then making sure that that information then gets back into the electronic health record seamlessly, so the physician knows that how there's getting her infusion that day, and we can call and be proactive with her parents. That's what I want to see. I wanted to be almost like concierge care for us, which is.

00:06:30
Speaker 1: There an obstacle to getting there right now?

00:06:32
Speaker 4: Well, we are starting to break down those those barriers with our five G cellular network. You know, hospitals for example, we've been soul reliant on Wi Fi and Wi Fi is just not meant for a mobile environment.

00:06:47
Speaker 3: It's not meant.

00:06:48
Speaker 4: I mean, I have calls dropped from the OAR to the ICU and that's frustrating for clinicians.

00:06:55
Speaker 1: I went into my bank yesterday where I banked for twenty years, because they had locked me out of my account digitally, and I had to do something transfer money, and I went in transfer money, stay, waited the line, finally got to the teller, went to all kinds of stuff and then she looked at me and she goes, can't do that. It's like, why can't you do it? And she said not making She said Wi Fi is down.

00:07:17
Speaker 3: It's like all right, see that's what happened, right. These delivery lose customers.

00:07:22
Speaker 6: Customers the way.

00:07:24
Speaker 1: No one seemed to care at all that they had lost me as a customer, which she's hurt my feelings.

00:07:29
Speaker 4: WiFi is not going away, but it doesn't have to be my primary focus anymore. And also it's not just about the four walls of the hospital anymore. We want to one of our other strategies over the next couple of years is to do as much care at home as possible and to have a five G enabled environment that levels the playing field for our patients.

00:07:51
Speaker 3: Wi Fi was.

00:07:52
Speaker 5: A great solution in the four G era, and as we start to learn to use data differently and we start to see the evolution of how we can take important customer or patient information and get smarter and provide better solutions or faster, or whether it's from a cost perspective or whether it's from a quality of treatment perspective, the amount of data that is available to us and us being able to do something with that data is so quickly and rapidly evolving. And in a Wi Fi world, you need more consistency. You need SLAS, and you need to be SLA is service level agreement. So you need to be able to say where this type of surgery are using this kind of machine, If we're going to capture data, or we're going to actually in the future use an automated device to do some important kind of function, we need to be able to say the latency and the capacity, that those things are firm and that there's no variation. You can't do that on a Wi Fi network when you've got hundreds of other kinds of connections all around it. But with a private network or a designated network slice, what you're able to do is to say, okay, these are the guaranteed service levels that we're going to give this connection all the time.

00:09:07
Speaker 1: I can build bespoke digital connections between individual bits of technology and some kind of central command post in a way that I can't do with with Wi Fi.

00:09:18
Speaker 5: And the other thing is is Heather does more and more transformation of the way that her it organization serves their ultimate mission as a hospital and for children. The amount of connections are going to increase. I mean there are it's probably from hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands.

00:09:39
Speaker 1: What do you mean when you say amount of connections be more?

00:09:42
Speaker 4: I mean every physician has their own cell phone, a nurse has, you know, his or her own cell phone plus a device that's provided to them for their clinical shift. They've got workstation on wheels. We've got workstations, you know at the nurse's station. We've got medical devices. We've got ventilators, we have you know, ivy pumps. All of those things are wired if you will. And then you have the patients who have their devices, their iPads, their cell phones, and everyone expects everything to work perfectly.

00:10:16
Speaker 5: In addition to that, aside from the quality of service that you receive, you think about patient data or hippo compliance in your field, the security measures that are required if you have to do VPN and Wi Fi access for every one of those secure, there's a lot of room for attack and era. And one of the things that we've been talking about and working with all of our customers is how do we take the very connection and encrypt it.

00:10:43
Speaker 1: I want to come back to that point in much more detail, but before we I want to talk to you el. Can you do the same thing. Give me a very specific example of something you would like your customers or your employees in your reatual outlets to be able to do that you think would make a meaningful difference.

00:11:06
Speaker 2: The big focus from us is on our team members right now in service of the customers. It's basically delivering predictability so that you can make sure that these things all work. And it's a complicated process that you have to make very very simple.

00:11:22
Speaker 3: So here's an example of it.

00:11:24
Speaker 2: When you're dealing with, you know, the customer base that we're focused on. It's the people with farms. You know, they have animals, livestock on their farms. It's a very very you know, important thing, right, So we've got to make sure that if they ask information about what's the right food, what's the right ingredients that we're making up that food, what's the right food for the right time in the life cycle of a let's say a chicken. It's very important, but we got to take it to another level, like what about the sustainability of how that food was created? Like what ingredients go into that food.

00:11:56
Speaker 1: So the idea is that what we're trying to do is to increase the kind of sophistication of the encounter between the store and the customer. I do know, just go in there and say I want that. Now, the customer's go and expecting a much richer kind of interaction with the store, and you need to be able to measure up to expectation.

00:12:16
Speaker 3: So are your team members? Are your team members?

00:12:18
Speaker 4: I mean they have their handheld their devices and so when you're talking about you know, at their fingertips, you're bringing all that data forward.

00:12:27
Speaker 5: Can I offer something that I think is really incredible that tractor supply is doing. So. I grew up on a farm, and I remember something would break on the farm. You're on a farm, You're out twenty thirty forty to fifty miles from what where the store is. Oftentimes maybe not in a place where Amazon's going to show up and deliver that same day. To be able to work with a retailer that understands when you have to stop and go and get the correct solution for the thing that broke down. The timing of crops or the timing of when you've got to get cattle ready for sale is so important that if you have to go off and spend eight hours to track down where do I get the thing that I need? It really does have an impact on your profitability, your bottom line as a farmer. And I think you guys are really helping to bring technology into a way that really serves your customers.

00:13:15
Speaker 6: We'll be right back after a short break. We're back.

00:13:27
Speaker 1: I want you to dig into this a little more because there are probably there is probably you know, when I compare the two worlds that you guys come from, consumer reactions, feelings about those two worlds are very different. There's an enormous amount of customer dissatisfaction in healthcare. It's annoying to go to your doctor or the hospital half the time. Yes, seventeen million forms. Doctors hate digital health records.

00:13:55
Speaker 4: When you think about where healthcare started with the electronic health record, it was everything that we did on paper, We're going to now make it electronic. And I remember talking to some EHR electronic Health Records twenty five years ago and they're like, we're going to make it faster, We're going to make it easier physicians. And I said, never tell them that, because nothing is faster than a piece of paper and a pen when it comes to documenting.

00:14:22
Speaker 3: And now the pendulum.

00:14:25
Speaker 4: Has shifted with electronic health records, with ambient AI, with.

00:14:30
Speaker 1: Quick what do you mean by ambient air?

00:14:31
Speaker 3: I can talk in the room, you know, the hey Google.

00:14:35
Speaker 1: Oh, I say okay.

00:14:36
Speaker 3: And you know.

00:14:37
Speaker 4: We've been we've been piloting that in some of our nursing units where they come into the room and the end they can talk to the patient and capture that information instead of sitting there with their back to the patient typing.

00:14:50
Speaker 1: Yeah. So the simple act of if I can do stuff while I am still engaged with you, why do I makes all the difference in the.

00:14:58
Speaker 5: World, because you know, in my world, meeting with customers really trying to listen and focus on what do they need, what's the problem that they're trying to solve, But then it takes thirty minut it's forty five minutes of quiet, focused time to just capture what are all the next steps and what are the things that I've got to go and do afterwards. And so that's less time that I get to spend with the customer, and it might mean less time that I'm really able to focus in on what the customer is telling me. But with tools that we have today that we're already using and selling and providing for customers, we're able to take recorded sessions like this, and the AI will summarize the action items and we'll even set up a calendar appointment.

00:15:39
Speaker 3: So I think about in.

00:15:40
Speaker 5: Healthcare, if I were able to get the discussion with the doctor and they say, hey, Keli, you're forty five, you need a colonoscopy, wouldn't that be great if it was already scheduled and that that follow up was already taken care of, because because I may not want to schedule that I mean admitting that I have forty nine forty five and have to follow but mightbe more than I can handle. But if you can use and I'm making a joke, but imagine what that will empower in terms of healthcare, for us to have tools that take people from not wanting to deal with the message and putting them into the next stuff.

00:16:15
Speaker 1: Kind of Well, this brings a question I had for al. You're asking a lot more of your retail staff. They're no longer simply managing a transaction. Now the real partners with the customer. If you upgrade the technology, you've to start redefining your relationship the role of your sports staff.

00:16:36
Speaker 2: If you notice I keep bringing up the customer and the team member and they're intertwined. That's one of the reasons why is because you got to think through all this. As you add more capabilities, you got to increase the productivities, Like how do I use AI to actually generate code? We actually do that. Now, how do we use it to generate test scripts so that we can test things faster get it into market. And the same thing does apply, you know in the walls of the retail location. Is because it's like how do I make replenishment faster. How do I make you know, labeling faster in a store? What's the process for that? So anything and everything is on the table now.

00:17:13
Speaker 1: So you when you role out of the big differences between your world and Heathers is heather Euro at one institution. How many stores does truct Supply have?

00:17:22
Speaker 2: We have twenty two hundred Tractor Supply stores and two hundred at pet Sun stores.

00:17:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, so when you roll out something, do you roll it out incrementally or do you do it in all twenty two hundred places?

00:17:33
Speaker 2: Some days we do it in an incremental fashion. What we do is, you know, we have labs within our Store support Center and Brent La, Tennessee to support those locations, and we test in those labs typically. The second thing we do is we work very closely. There's a group of stores that are considered, you know, like the test stores, but they're they're the team members that have more of that that engineering, that tinkering mindset. So we've identified roughly one hundred stores and they basically we deploy it to them and they test it and they give us feedback and then we kind of iterate through it and then we start deploying it two larger volumes of the store of the change.

00:18:12
Speaker 5: I think we were talking about it earlier, which was the role of the CIO really evolving. The work that I've done at T Mobile for twenty years with my IT teams is very different today than the work that we were doing twenty years ago. And I think you all it's fun to hear you talk about your risk takers or you want to move fast because of the speed of what is happening with data and what is happening with the connectivity solutions and what we can do with AI. And I think in retail and in healthcare, there's people that are willing now to push the limits. So you're now a culture leader for your company, whereas before I don't know if I thought of my head of it as a culture leader for the company per se. But you're changing the way that people work. You're changing what they are able to provide for their customers in profound ways, and I think that's a really cool part of your jobs.

00:19:09
Speaker 1: How long before an IT person becomes the CEO of a traditional bricks and motor company.

00:19:15
Speaker 4: That's that's my ultimate goal is to be CEO of the hospital someday for reals.

00:19:21
Speaker 3: It's a big jump because.

00:19:25
Speaker 4: If you don't position yourself as a partner with the strategy and with the business, especially in healthcare, then you become the order taker. And my philosophy is I don't want my IT teams to be order takers. I want us to be seen as partners.

00:19:41
Speaker 1: I'm curious about the relationship between the interaction between you and non IT people in your organizations. We spoke to about this a little bit. I want to dig in on this. Are there parts of your vision for the company that are difficult to convince others of to explain to do people get how you said, whether you guys are at a tipping point? Do non IT people get that? Do it?

00:20:09
Speaker 7: Is?

00:20:10
Speaker 1: It a hard time convincing?

00:20:11
Speaker 4: And sometimes I will tell you the introduction of five of a private five G cellular environment, first of it's kind in healthcare. I really had to sell that to the organization because they're like, well, we have Wi FI And they said, then why do you keep calling me and telling me that your calls are dropping from.

00:20:28
Speaker 3: The o R to the ICU. So putting it into.

00:20:33
Speaker 4: To some you know, to articulate not to talk about the bits and the bytes, but to talk about what problems are we trying to solve and can technology do that? And if so, are you willing to do that with me? Because I am not an end user in the host, I don't I don't use the electronic health record, but I have to make sure that it works and sitting at the table and having the conversations because I will tell you when I go to do my budget every year, I don't know how. You how, but you know storage and compute and you know a new virtual server somewhere is not as sexy as IVY pumps and MRI machine. So I'm competing with you know, the same dollars. And but yet I have to explain to my peers, you can't have the cool, sexy stuff if the foundation, if the infrastructure isn't there.

00:21:28
Speaker 3: We have to invest in.

00:21:29
Speaker 1: How large is your team? Your I T team?

00:21:32
Speaker 3: I have over four hundred you're four hundred people.

00:21:35
Speaker 1: How long is your team?

00:21:36
Speaker 2: So we have roughly four hundred team members and about a thousand contractors that work for us.

00:21:42
Speaker 1: You're talking just about the it Yeah, Oh my goodness.

00:21:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a it's a complicate it's a complicated enterprise.

00:21:50
Speaker 3: I mean a lot of different skill set.

00:21:51
Speaker 2: Five years ago, how large would probably half the size?

00:21:56
Speaker 1: Is that same for you headn't.

00:21:57
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:21:58
Speaker 1: In other words, I should be telling my daughters there's really only one thing you should be studying.

00:22:05
Speaker 3: Dentistry. CIOs have to prove the value of it.

00:22:11
Speaker 4: That's our I mean, we have to market it because in healthcare and healthcare I I'm not a revenue generating department. I'm not a radiology department, you know, I'm not a surgeon surgical department.

00:22:24
Speaker 3: I'm a cost center.

00:22:25
Speaker 4: So I have to show the value, whether that's qualitatively or quantitatively, just about every single day.

00:22:32
Speaker 3: And so it's it's a balance.

00:22:35
Speaker 1: One of the things I love in when I'm talking to people who are experts in a particular field is they see the world differently than because you have an area of expertise the rest of us don't have. Right, So this is one of the questions on those lines, I would like every one of each of you to describe a situation that you're in in the world where you say to yourself, under your breath, you guys really need my help. Give me the you guys, I actually have one. I'm not an IT person I have on you guys, not the story of my bank about it, but I want alan We're gonna go first, give you an example of you guys really need by health.

00:23:15
Speaker 2: Honestly experiences at like concert events, sporting events. I think there's a lot of opportunity and I'm not trying to.

00:23:25
Speaker 1: So what do you what do you go to a are you football fan?

00:23:28
Speaker 3: What are you football concert?

00:23:31
Speaker 1: Yeah? What is it you want you're not getting?

00:23:33
Speaker 2: I mean, I want to be able to have the connectivity, be able to interact more with the stats, with the you know, what's happening on the field. I want to be able to be in a position where I don't have to leave my seat because I actually want to watch the game.

00:23:45
Speaker 7: You know.

00:23:45
Speaker 2: If I'm at a concert, I want to be able to you know, is there a way I could zoom into webcams to see closer if I have bad seats to the show, if I want to know the song that they're playing, or you know, the number of times they've played it depending on the type of music you like. You know, I just see a much more interactive experience.

00:24:03
Speaker 7: So Heather, your choice choice, I'm going to stick with hell Care It would just be lovely if every if a patient that moved either.

00:24:15
Speaker 4: Between hospitals, moved between states, that we didn't have to fill out the forms again, how nice would it be for that?

00:24:30
Speaker 1: Keli?

00:24:31
Speaker 5: Yeah, I have a dear friend that has cancer, and watching her try to figure out how to become an expert in the medical field just so that she could get the appropriate treatment and coordinating all of the different doctors that were required, I think was really tough to watch, and I think lots of unfortunately lots of families have gone.

00:24:53
Speaker 3: Through kind of that experience.

00:24:56
Speaker 5: I think one that I do every day, or it seems like every day, is I get on an airplane. And I think airlines have come a long way to make it more digital and more self serve and more connected. But I still think there's an awful lot that they could benefit from in both your experience and being able to focus on the experience of a person that's flying all the time and what.

00:25:21
Speaker 3: That experience could look like.

00:25:22
Speaker 5: I think we've all decided we're going to sit like we're in a bus and.

00:25:28
Speaker 3: We just take it.

00:25:30
Speaker 5: But I think there's a lot of things they could do to make what it's like to try and manage a travel schedule through flight and connect with people that you love or business could be seller.

00:25:43
Speaker 1: I think what I just came up with listening to you, which is it's just about deplaning from the airplane. It drives me up the wall.

00:25:54
Speaker 5: Right.

00:25:55
Speaker 1: So we have an AI system that creates an algorithm what's the fastest way to deplane this thing? And it looks and sees where you are, how you're sitting. All you do is punch in how many bags you have, where they are, and then you sit in your No one moves. You sit in your chair with your phone, and this is your churn. Malcolm, get up now. I swear to God they would make it. Okay, here's the other one say. At the same time I was on it, I was in a vacation my family. But some hotel. We go down the to the to the restaurant in morning. Person looks at me and they go, what's your name? They type type it in, what's your room number? Type it in, what's your telephone number? Type it in, and then they stare at the screen for what looks like forty five seconds. The email place is half empty, and then they print out a piece of paper and take it and put it on my It's like, is this nineteen eighty five? Like, what is going on here? Why can't the person all I want to your point about healthcare? And maybe this is way way lower stakes, but I just want someone to look me in the eye and say, welcome.

00:27:02
Speaker 3: To the restaurant.

00:27:03
Speaker 1: That's all I want. Yeah, yeah, like this is I feel like, will you give me your cell at the end of this so I can just call you next time I had this experience, I just hand the phone out. I have someone to talk to.

00:27:16
Speaker 3: Yes, malcome, I'll thank you.

00:27:20
Speaker 1: Well. This has been incredibly fun. Thanks to all of you. Good luck with what you do, and may you someday we can do this in a couple of years And now I hope I'll be talking to the CEO of Boston Children's and of Tractor Supply. This episode was made in partnership with T Mobile for Business and iHeartMedia. Special thanks to Calli Field, President of T Mobile Business Group, Heather Nelson, Chief Information Officer at Boston Children's Hospital, al Letera, Senior Vice president of IT at Tractor Supply, and the entire production crew at iHeartMedia. This episode was produced by Nina Lawrence and ben at Aph Haffrey, Editing by Sarah Nis, mastering by Jake Krsky. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. I'm Malcolm Glama.