A Strategic Approach To Modernizing and Automating the Enterprise

Dayle Hall:

Hi. You’re listening to our podcast, Automating the Enterprise. I’m your host, Dayle Hall. This podcast is designed to give organizations the insights and best practices on how to integrate, automate and transform their enterprise. Our next guest has 20-plus years of experience as an IT leader and has been integral to strategic business alignment, performance acceleration, customer success and standardizing global IT operations across all those years. Let’s welcome Michael Loggins, the global vice president of IT for SMC. Michael, welcome. 

Michael Loggins:

Hi. How are you doing? Thanks for having me.

Dayle Hall:

Absolutely. Thanks for joining us today. Hopefully, this is going to be a great conversation. I want to kick off just with a couple of things so we can get to know who you are. Give us a quick overview of who you are within the organization at SMC but also how you fell into this type of role, did you always want to be in the IT organization and how you got to be this global vice president that you are today at SMC.

Michael Loggins:

I’ll start with me first and then get to SMC. So I think you said it, I’ve been in the IT field for about 20 years. Prior to that, I was actually a classically trained tuba player, trying to figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up.

Dayle Hall:

Wow, tuba, not as good a career move, I’m guessing.

Michael Loggins:

Yeah, yeah. There’s not a ton of those guys around there. So got into IT, started at the help desk level, put my nose into everything I possibly could, kept getting the opportunities to do new things and learn new things and kept growing from there. And this is where I sit. This is 22 years of forgetting to say no to new projects.

Dayle Hall:

Give me one or two things that you feel like — obviously, 20 years is a long time. And I think 20 months, IT changes so much these days. What are the big things that you call back and go, I can’t believe how much this has changed? What’s the big change within IT you’ve seen?

Michael Loggins:

First of all, connectivity. When I started doing IT, we were pulling BRI pairs off of a PRI line to connect people with ISDN connectivity. And now we’re bringing up SD-WANs in a quarter of the time it took with tons more bandwidth and capabilities than we did before. From a structure standpoint, I think the capabilities of connectivity have been the biggest change. Obviously, the cloud, the idea of hosting somebody else’s stuff has been out there for a long time, but the mechanisms and the capabilities of those obviously have been huge.

Dayle Hall:

Absolutely, a massive change. And I’ve been at SnapLogic just over 2 1/2 years. But they went through this iteration eight, nine years ago where they were moving from on-prem to hybrid to pure cloud. And the opportunities it presented, not just for SnapLogic but, look, marketing. You’ve seen the slide. There’s 10,000 martech solutions now. Obviously, they’re all cloud solutions. It’s crazy.

Michael Loggins:

Absolutely. The go-to-market capabilities, if you’re backed by the cloud technology, it’s a much faster go-to-market, a much faster scale-up. I think you’ve seen that not only in the martech, fintech has been the same thing. Manufacturing technology has been the same. The cloud has just really allowed that innovation to really penetrate out there. 

Dayle Hall:

And I see it a lot. Obviously, I have kids. And education tech and how they’ve been able to — literally during COVID, it was a challenge, but they were able to scale and actually keep the children learning during a global pandemic. Ten years ago, there’s no way that’s happening. So it’s been an interesting time. So tell me a little bit about your day-to-day at SMC.

Michael Loggins:

I’ve been at SMC now for 16 years. The intent there was to get 6 months of a breather from consulting delivery. And 16 years later, I’m here talking to you. The cool thing about SMC, SMC is a global company. We’re the world’s largest pneumatic manufacturer, so we make pneumatic and automation components for industrial automation amongst a ton of other different applications of our product. And the cool thing about working at SMC is on any given day, whether you drive or fly somewhere, eat food, use your computer, use your phone, you’re interacting with something that has been powered by SMC, whether in the manufacturing process, the shipping process, the packaging process. 

We’re in the middle of so many cool technologies and in the middle of so many cool vertical markets that it’s really cool to see where all we fit in. And the fact that, like I said, you can’t go a day without interacting with something that has been powered by SMC. That’s the cool thing about SMC. From a challenge standpoint, SMC is a 60-plus-year-old company. We’re headquartered out of Tokyo, Japan. The way the company was designed and created was as they created all these subsidiaries around the globe to handle the localized markets in those countries, they really beefed up the need for autonomy of those local subsidiaries from the parent company, which was fantastic, because no one can understand the locals and markets better than someone who’s on the ground. 

But what we’ve seen, especially the last five years, the world has gotten a lot smaller and the geographic boundaries of a country no longer dictate business as much as they used to. So as our customers started to be multinational, as our competitors were definitely becoming more multinational, we had to be more than just a multinational company. Just saying we’re everywhere doesn’t necessarily help. Our big globalized customers are expecting to work with a big globalized supplier. With that in mind, we started going down the path about seven years ago of trying to figure out how to unify our sales division, so they could work together as a global entity. So when they’re working with customers who are global and multinational, we are competing with ourselves through different channels. 

We’re not leading with different applications for the same type of solution. Getting our sales division on the same page was the first thing we did. And that’s become very successful, especially in our larger customers, like I said, in our larger multinational and global customers. So we decided to keep going down that path. We took the approach starting in 2019 of, hey, we need to really unify the company, make us a true globalized company. And we’re going to start with IT. So we’re all using the same systems. We all have access to the same sets of data. We can get a lot more accomplished, and we can start really building on the economies of scale of how many great people we have at SMC. 

We started down that path in 2019, and now that’s where I got the opportunity to lead this group. And we’ve built our global IT team from four people up to over 75 in a year. That consists of our highly technical engineers, architects, operators in our data center space and application space, a great team of project management and business analysts and then a great supporting staff that really helps make everything work really smoothly, especially with the amount of change that we’re introducing into a 60-year-old organization. We caused a lot of trouble for the company because we are not taking a step-by-step 60-year growth approach to how we want to do something. We know what needs to happen, and we’re moving. 

So for some organizations, this is not a huge lift for them to take another step to globalize in a much more higher tech IT. Some, this is a complete shift in how they do business and how they visualize IT, how IT works with the business. We’ve gone all-in on this from an SMC standpoint. And like I said, I’ve just been lucky to be able to have the opportunity to lead this team.

Dayle Hall:

What I love about what you said actually is, first of these, you said two things that really stick out to me. One is you had an end goal in mind. It wasn’t just like, hey, we have to move to the cloud. One of those initiatives you had was unifying the sales division, how do we make sure that we’re all on the same page. And the second thing that I really like about what you said was IT was going to lead it. We hear a lot at SnapLogic now around the lines of businesses wanting to do things themselves and there’s the shadow IT organization. I’d love to hear more from you how that process works. But having a very specific business goal in mind, unifying the sales divisions and then saying, let’s let IT get the people, the process and the tools in place to make sure we can do that. I guarantee that’s going to have a better outcome than all this, hey, I’m going to put this new system in and IT moved too slow.

Michael Loggins:

Absolutely. To be honest, it started that way. It was also in IT was like, hey, we bought this. And IT, we need to make it work. It didn’t work. We ended up reimplementing it three times. When we took the IT approach to it, it’s not that we’re smarter. It’s just we understand how little people actually want to use the technology sometimes that we put in front of them. So we focused a lot on change and adoption, not just to create technical implementations. So it really became one of those things where we just bring a different approach and sometimes the business units are going to bring something.

Dayle Hall:

And I think that will obviously help. Like you said, you don’t have to reimplement things. You can actually do it the right way. One of the things that we hear a lot now because of COVID as well was once a lot of people were out of the office, that caused breakdown in processes, automations, things that they thought were working. But there was still someone in the office pushing a button or moving something. So if you have that relationship upfront, you’re aligned with the lines of business. I can guarantee you’re probably going to have a better outcome of these investments.

Michael Loggins:

Absolutely. And you’re hitting the organizational chain much better too. When something happens in the sales division, we’re not scrapping everything. We can pivot with them at that point. We’re on the outside trying to figure out how to help and they pivot. We’re going to be late to the game, and it’s just going to cause more havoc.

Dayle Hall:

That’s a good example. And I’ll come back to that in a little bit. Let’s go back to some of the challenges that I know you probably had, other organizations have, when we talk about how to modernize the enterprise. You mentioned it yourself, cloud technologies. How do you think about this? And what kind of advice would you give to people around how do you start moving legacy applications and data from on-prem to cloud? What stays on-prem? And how do you create some of these processes and standardizations to make sure that you can really leverage what the current technology is available to?

Michael Loggins:

I’ll preface with when I think of cloud, I’m less about where the computing is and it’s more of the operating model of flexibility, availability, durability and things. So we have done several things. So we’re building a robust private cloud to make sure that we have the ability to operate what we feel we need to operate at the highest capabilities on-prem. We have the ability to leverage right now all four of the major hyperscalers as extensions of our network and our infrastructure. Our goal is to have as many options as it makes sense that fall into our operating model, which is heavily reliant on automation, crazy automation. Everything has to be automated. It’s that durability and availability conversation that it comes up and makes us figure out how to do that. 

So when we look at the cloud that way, that’s how I view what we’re trying to do with the cloud and our direction. And like I said before, it has nothing to do with what we’re trying to deliver for IT’s sake. It’s really trying to match what is the goal of the business right now. What are they trying to achieve? And where do we put these applications, these systems? How do we enhance these systems to meet that business need? We’re not solely looking at run rates. We’re not solely looking at just legal requirements for data sovereignty. We look at all of those, and obviously those did help provide those decisions. 

But sometimes it is just a, hey, this group of people, the latency going across the globe, even if it’s just halfway across the globe, is horrible. So we have to move that workload to where they need to go. If we have to transport workloads around the globe, if they’re legacy applications, then we set our systems up so we can transport that workload to follow the sun. So really focused on the outcomes of what we are building and how the business is going to use them. One of the reasons why the operating model in the cloud is so powerful for us, it has capabilities being powerful for so many different organizations. Outside of that, when we look at deciding whether we’re going to bring something and leave it on-premise or if we’re going to put it into a public environment, a lot of that has to do with age of the application, the capabilities of that application. 

Moving legacy directly into the cloud is costly and very hard to manage. I think a lot of people who just basically lifted and shifted into the hyperscalers found that out after a little bit of time. We’re making sure that any of those types of environments are safe in either a true IS, hybrid cloud or your private cloud that really makes that a lot easier. Where we really want to focus our public cloud uses when we have the opportunity is new application development where we can, things leveraging new technologies that make them portable, fast and/or their multiregional nature. So as we go down that path, that’s where we’re putting one of our focus on from cloud technology. Core cloud technology is on new application development.

Dayle Hall:

That’s good. And I like that because when we have these podcasts, what I’m always interested in is what is the listener going to hear from you and say I have to think about it that way. What I just heard, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, when someone would listen to this and say, okay, so moving a lot of legacy technology can be costly. So really look at whether you want to do that or do you want to start with new applications. So that’s one area. And then really look at, you mentioned it with the sales example, are you solving business problems and what new technologies are out there to help grow the business, solve the business problems and start with those in the cloud. What’s the governance process for that? Do you have a council, a committee? Do you work with lines of businesses? How do you manage that internally within your organization?

Michael Loggins:

We have two things. In my global IT organization, I have a governance, risk and compliance group. So they manage all the legal components of what we have to do to make sure that we protect the company and manage those risks. But then I also make sure that we understand the other technical risks that exist and we’re addressing those in any of our designs. We work with that group as well as whatever the business unit is requesting, whatever they’re requesting to really come up with that best answer. Hey, somebody wants this type of information. Then we have the what kind of information is it? Where is it? Are we allowed to have it? Are we allowed to put it anywhere? 

We go down those lists so we can make sure that as we’re designing and building, whether it’s the application or whatever the solution is, that we are managing all the risks of the business that are important at that time. As we were globalizing, one of the first things we ever built was this governance, risk and compliance group. We knew that, as engineers and technical people, we’re not going to have a great handle on all the jurisdictions and all of the privacy laws and sovereignty laws that were out there and still be able to deliver on what we needed to. So we needed experts to do that, and that’s what we’ve created with this group.

Dayle Hall:

How do you determine internally what you want to potentially develop in-house? How do you manage what you want to build, what you potentially want to buy a solution and manage it, whether it’s private cloud, public cloud or maybe partner with someone? How do you go through that process internally?

Michael Loggins:

The build versus buy is still a fluid process. And a lot of that is really based on what it is we’re trying to do. There’s no reason for us to ever build an ERP system. That’s crazy. Other companies have already done that. And there’s best practices around how to implement those, how to work those in the systems. And those large-scale systems make a lot of sense to leverage a buy mentality of, hey, people have spent millions and millions of dollars in R&D here and development work testing to do this. When we get into things that are very specific to us and we need more of a bespoke solution for it, rather than trying to form our business process back into something that’s what we want and then end up realizing that you’ve abandoned really the essence of what you’re trying to do, things that are completely unique to what we do as SMC, those are the ones that we want to focus on building. And those are the ones that we want to make sure that we are in control of that process. 

That doesn’t necessarily mean we won’t bring partners in, but it means that we play a different role. We’re not just the customer. When we’re on these projects, we are the product owners of those teams. We are part of the business analysis teams. We’re in the QA process. We leverage those partners as true extensions of our team. So we make sure that when they’re delivering what we want, it matches what we need. It’s not a constant back-and-forth bickering of what we’re asking versus what’s delivering, and then there’s some project major from the vendors sitting there with change request forms ready to hit you every time that you ask a question. I want to make sure that we’re really a part of that development process.

Dayle Hall:

Obviously, you’re very familiar with the low-code/no-code. There’s people looking at various types of automations. And you’ve just talked about build versus buy versus partner. How do you reconcile? Are you looking at specific automations to solve problems? Are you just looking at let’s have as many of those as possible to free up people’s time? How do you really look at what you can automate within the business? The second part of the question is then how do you manage the growing challenge around data and who gets it and when and how much access do they need? How do you manage those two pieces?

Michael Loggins:

Let’s go specifically with low-code/no-code. I love that because it also allows us to expand into a ton of different types of technologies from that low-code/no-code standpoint without having to have deep technical knowledge of a specific language set, data set, things like that, where we’ve seen problems in the past. And I think some of my colleagues are having this as well. Low-code/no-code does not mean it’s a business-driven application system. So also having a bunch of accountants or salespeople designing software because they don’t need to actually understand the programming language is not going to give you the outcome that you’re typically looking for. Developers have a very specific way of thinking about how to do things. 

We miss out on that if we don’t have them still involved in the process, whether or not they’re writing 100,000 lines of code or bringing three or four automation objects together and linking them. It’s that mindset that they bring. It’s that discipline they bring that really makes that difference. So although that’s all out there, we really are trying to bring that back into IT and leverage our application development staff to help really drive those initiatives. And there, it’s about speed. We can’t take a week and a half to develop an automation that they could have done in 30 minutes. We had to have it done in less than 30 minutes. So it’s really then how you’re delivering that to the business. 

When we look at all the other things that are out there to automate, I’m one of those people. I think, as an IT leader, our job is to incite the charge for automation in IT. There’s a lot of people who have a fear of automating a lot of things in IT. Obviously, you have IT people who are worried about losing their jobs out of those things. But I think our job in IT is we really need to push that agenda forward and get things done. I’m not a 100% believer that if you do this more than twice, it should be automated. I think there’s much better calculations to figure out whether you should automate things. And once again, I think it goes back to what’s the cost of it versus the value it delivers. If it’s a high-cost and a high-value task, then it should absolutely be automated. 

But things that cost very little to do and add very little to the business should be low on the list. Unfortunately, a lot of times, those get to be the ones that get done first because they’re usually low-hanging fruit. But we don’t want to spend weeks automating a process that one person who makes minimum wage does once a month.

Dayle Hall:

That’s a really important point. Our DEO has this expression. He calls it the land of broken toys, meaning exactly what you just described. Someone has a problem that they’re trying to solve, and then they feel they can bring in a low-code tool. They probably use it for a short period of time and then they go after something else, and it just sits there in the organization not being controlled or just not being used. And I love what you said, which is low-code/no-code does not mean that it’s a business-driven system or it’s something that you necessarily must have. And I think one of the key things is having that good relationship with IT specifically. 

But the most important thing you said is we can’t take a week to develop something that they can do themselves in 30, 40 minutes. And I think that is the case, spin, react. Making sure you can support the lines of businesses and those decisions quickly will mean you’ll just have a better relationship. So when you go into these discussions, how do you get that agreement upfront? Is that a commitment you make?

Michael Loggins:

It’s a commitment we make. It’s one that I think every IT department struggles with. I think speed is hard from an internal IT organization to maintain. So it’s a place where we’re constantly working on. There are times we suck at it. We see the problem. That’s when shadow IT comes up when you take two weeks to deliver something that they feel they could have done in a day. And when my staff gets mad about it, I’m not thrilled about it, but I go back and make sure they understand that we did that. The business needs to operate a business and they need to do things that make the most sense so we can be profitable and we can keep gaining our market share. And if we’re not matching the speed and the urgency of what they need, then we are going to create those instances where shadow IT comes out. 

And the goal needs to be to find ways to be better than they can be in their shadow IT and then they won’t want to shadow IT. They won’t want to do all this work if we can deliver as fast or if not faster than them and do it in a way that allows them to scale and grow. So I think, definitely, when it comes to those things, it’s a matter of we have to own a good relationship with the business. A lot of that is facing the fact that we most likely don’t have a great relationship with the business. And that’s part of the first thing that we start working on. 

And we find that there are parts of the business that we work really well with. And we have great open conversations, and we can get together and do a more agile approach to designing and developing applications and solutions together. And then we have some parts of the business that is what have you done for me lately relationship between them and IT. And sometimes, we haven’t done much for them lately, so it’s hard to get them to buy in on some of the things we want to do. 

Dayle Hall:

Again, we hear that a lot from our customers. And I think starting with a business challenge, what are you solving for the business, making sure that you’re coming to the table with what their organizations need, what the other functions need, understanding that speed for them is probably more important than some of the things that you have around control and making sure data is privacy and security and so on. But at least, you’re having those conversations. You mentioned there’s different types of cloud, and there’s a different level of support for the business and things you want to do in IT within your organization. 

How do you set that vision and strategy to make sure that you’re aligned with what the business is trying to solve, make sure what you’re trying to commit to the function? Do you set a vision with them? Do you set it for IT? Who buys into it? Do you get support at the C level? How do you actually set that vision strategy and move it forward? 

Michael Loggins:

We start with thinking we know what we need to do to make IT the group that the company needs us to be. If you don’t have a good feeling of where you sit in the company from an IT standpoint, how they view you, that would be my first recommendation is find out. They don’t like you, then starting off with some great applications is not going to get you anywhere because you have to build that trust. So I think we start with that, and I think there’s always those things that we know we need to do, the pay-to-play-type projects that need to be done to make sure that we’re safe, secure, up to standards, have flexibility to make changes and move. 

But when it comes to the core of what we focus on every year, we try to take that directly from what the president of the organization and the Board is telling their shareholders and the company what they’re trying to do. We look at those initiatives, we look and say, okay, what do we do to make sure that initiative can be possible? Where do we fit into this initiative? And there are some of those initiatives obviously that we don’t fit in directly. We’re three or four layers down in the path. And so then, okay, this is a marketing-related initiative. Okay, so what do we need to do and work with marketing to make sure they can go do this? 

We’re doing a large-scale business continuity plan for our factories. Well, obviously, for that to work, we have to have a business continuity plan that is just rock solid for our IT systems since everything is digital at this point. So making sure that we have that in place so they can then start figuring out how to do that continuity testing and planning on machinery and materials and supply chain. So really understanding where you fit into all those processes, and then we let that determine what’s the most important thing for us to work on. And obviously, we want to be ahead of any of those large initiatives. 

Again, there’s nothing worse than the rest of the company staring at you, going we can’t do this big thing we need to do because you guys haven’t done your thing. We’re busy doing other projects. So it’s really making sure that we have that priority set. And then if we’re not sure, we ask. We don’t assume that we can understand what the number one priority is because we’re going to be wrong too many times.

Dayle Hall:

Communication is clearly the key. Obviously, SnapLogic started off as we have data and application integration. And we hear a lot of the talk is around automations. How do you think about integration versus automation? And how are you looking at those technologies to help you on your journey pointing to the businesses, moving cloud and so on? Well, how do you think about integration and automation? Is it the same thing? How do you go through that process of what to use?

Michael Loggins:

Integration is that additional toolbox that sits on top of automation that makes it more valuable. If I have to build 15 different automations and then figure out how to link them together and to have new things and then hop in and do forming new processes on another system. At the same time, it’s really not automation. You’re automating each individual task, but the integration piece allows you to automate the process as a wide system because it’s not a matter of starting and stopping constantly to go do another thing. We can tie everything together, not just in an orchestration standpoint, but in a very intelligent way of leveraging other systems, leveraging other sets of data, security, things like that to make the next decision on what to do, if you’re a human sitting there. So you’re not tied to doing just overly simple tasks over and over again.

Dayle Hall:

I love the concept of the integration sits on top of a lot of the automations. And I think there’s definitely some confusion, probably perpetuated by marketers like myself, around what automation is versus integration. But I definitely see there is some blurring in the lines there. And I think the best thing we can do when we talk to people like you is just make sure that the integration piece does sit on top of some of those automations. The automation should just run and run and run. Integration gives you the opportunity to do more, I think.

Michael Loggins:

Absolutely. It’s the icing on the cake.

Dayle Hall:

Do you have a separate strategy for that? Is it just part of solving business problems? How do you really look at integration and automation as a piece of the IT bosom?

Michael Loggins:

I think you nailed it. It goes back to how does it relates to solving the business problem. I will say right now in our journey from a cloud standpoint, the business problem is our cloud journey. When we look at a lot of the automation tools out there and the integration tools, data tools that are out there, a lot of those are being initially reviewed on. How does that help us really leverage the investments the business has made in our cloud journey but knowing that it can’t be just IT focused? At the end of the day, we have to be able to extend this and use it and just add it to our toolbox on how we solve business problems. That’s the goal there is we don’t want to get so tied into the name of the tool or so tied into specific sets of technology that our toolbox becomes limited in what we’re able to do. 

So it’s about maintaining that flexibility. So we are constantly looking for ways of, hey, if this is what works for the business, this is what we want to do. And hey, if this works here, what can we do elsewhere with this same tool? Especially with our scale being in the globe, we don’t want to have 80 different tools to do something similar. But we know we can’t have one. We have to come to the terms that driving everything down to a single tool does not work when you have a real global scale. There’s things that are unique about every country that you have to be able to match. And I think trying to figure out how to match that one tool gets very complicated. 

Dayle Hall:

How have you managed that global approach because, like you said, you definitely have to understand there are some nuances locally that you have to take into consideration. I think being able to scale to a global business. You guys have been around for a while. You’re growing a very mission-critical type of manufacturing that you’ve got. So how do you manage that globally? Is it different groups? Is it the different committees in a different part of the world? Or how do you manage that? 

Michael Loggins:

So what we first did is we had a group in Europe that was really starting to push just generalized RPA technologies in our European areas. So we let them create a center of excellence for automation in Europe and really help focus on that. And so what they’ve been able to do is build some governance around what do we automate, what don’t we automate, how do we review automation, what are we going to do and how are we going to do it. And they come over here in the US, and they’ve trained some of our people here in the US. They’ve gone and had this conversation in Japan. 

So what we’re doing is letting that team of people who now have the experience of this automation and have been able to deliver on business value of it, dictating some of the initial governance of how we do this. And then we start looking. What we have found in most of the countries we talked about, they’re already trying to do something with automation. And part of that is because of the DNA of our company and with us being in the middle of industrial automation. We have engineers all over the place. They’re going to look for ways to help make the manufacturing process or whatever processes they’re working on faster and more efficient. So we always found there’s already some type of automation process or projects going on. 

So a lot of it is understanding what are they doing and why are they doing it. Right now, what we ended up doing is we’re just building a catalog of all of these automations that are already out there and finding out where do we have duplicates of these automations, where do we have automations that there’s a gap in this country but this country over here already has one. And we’re already working right now just to share that information and get people thinking about automation as an actual tool to get work done, not just a way not to do work. Actually, a way to do work. And then as we are constantly understanding and learning about what SMC looks like across the globe, we find those opportunities to say, okay, we have five different ways of doing this exact same thing. This is when IT gets involved and immediately goes, let us design something that can match all five needs using a standardized tool because those are the things that have high value, have a high level of complexity, and improve what the company does. 

So that’s how we’re taking that approach. So it’s still very federated right now. It’s still very much in that consistent learning state. We don’t have all the tools up. Once again, we don’t want to sit there and go, hey, I love that you did this automation. But no, you can’t do that anymore. You have to use our automation. Because their next question is, okay, so how long is it going to be until we can use your automation? And then we’re going to be like, well, weeks, months. And they’re like, no, we’ll just use ours. It’s there. So it’s really making sure that when we start disrupting their current automation strategies, we’re either ready for an immediate adoption or we’re doing something different with that automation to make it more valuable to the whole organization.

Dayle Hall:

Talking across the globe, and I know a lot of our customers have the same challenges. How do you scale globally? What can you reuse? Again, I think, look, that’s why we exist, to give people the opportunity to use something to help them to do that and reuse. Michael, this has been a great conversation. A lot of things that I heard that hopefully people will take from this. I love the low-code/no-code doesn’t mean that’s always a business-driven system. I actually think you said that we don’t want accountants necessarily building their own system that they won’t use again. I think that’s brilliant. But I think also getting them in earlier in the process, giving them the opportunity to provide input just to make sure that they know that you’re going to act with speed. 

I love what you talked about around moving to cloud and transformation around flexibility, durability and availability. Those are three very key things. I think if you can deliver those principles to your business, all the functions will be happy. And finally, I love where we started, which was solving a problem or a business problem, a global team unifying the sales divisions, making sure that everyone is on the same page, not having to reimplement this thing three times because one organization wasn’t using it. And the last piece is you’re a hell of a tuba-playing IT professional, so that’s something new for us on this podcast. Maybe if we do this again, I’ll get you to play us a tune.

Michael Loggins:

Oh, thank you. Yes, sure. Absolutely.

Dayle Hall:

Okay. Michael, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate being part of this today. For everyone else, thanks for listening. This is Dayle Hall from SnapLogic. Thanks for listening to our podcast, Automating the Enterprise, and we’ll see you on the next one.