Uncovering Hidden Cloud Spend and Building Cyber Resilience

[00:00:00] Tina Gravel:  We talk about efficiencies. It’s really easy to do that. Sometimes we miss the humanity in our decisions. And so I would say don’t miss that because that to me is what’s going to make us different and better in the future with AI is that humanity, is the ability to see beyond the data and to understand what the human need.

[00:00:26] Scott Kinka:  And what it means for the rest of us. I’m Scott Kinka, and this is the Bridgecast, presented by Bridgepoint Technologies. Hi, and welcome back to the BridgeCast. Today, I am joined by Tina Gravel. She’s a technology executive, author, speaker. She’s got deep experience in cybersecurity, cloud, and importantly, partner ecosystems. We’ll talk a bit about that today. She also has a passion for advancing women in tech. Learn more about that. I have two daughters in tech, so I’m with her on that one. Throughout her career, Tina’s helped build security and go to market programs at companies including AppGate, Dimension Data, and most recently, at TierPoint. She’s also widely recognized for her ability to translate complex security and technology concepts into clear practical language for business leaders, and I think we’re probably gonna spend a decent amount of our time talking about that. Over the course of this episode, Tina…

[00:01:22] Tina Gravel:  Thanks for having me, Scott. Thrilled to be here.

[00:01:25] Scott Kinka:  Absolutely. Where are you right now?

[00:01:26] Tina Gravel:  I’m in Chicago, Illinois. And to the left of me, if I looked out, which I won’t, it’s Navy Pier. So that’ll give everybody a a vantage point of of what I’m doing and where I’m sitting.

[00:01:37] Scott Kinka:  Gotcha. And you are right in the throes of it in Chicago.

[00:01:40] Tina Gravel:  Yeah. We just had the air and water show this past week. I don’t think my dogs fully recovered from the sonic booms. It was fun.

[00:01:47] Scott Kinka:  Oh, yeah. How many dogs?

[00:01:48] Tina Gravel:  Just one. Thanks. Yeah. At least one. Just a little rescue.

[00:01:52] Scott Kinka:  Well, Tina, let’s… You’ve been a lot of places. You’ve done a lot of things. I know you’re spending your time now to your point. We’ll get into that. But you’ve spent your career helping organizations navigate some of these big technology shifts, and we’ll get into that from cloud to cyber, now AI. Looking back though, what first drew you into the technology industry?

[00:02:09] Tina Gravel:  I just wanted to sell something. I was in sales, and I wanted to sell something that took some digging. And I happened to run into somebody that worked for IBM and started interviewing with IBM. And back then, there weren’t that many computer companies like there are now. Right? So I think there were a handful of them, and I got offers from all of them. But I happen to be talking in a bar to a gentleman about which one should I choose, and he said, you need to talk to our company. And that was McDonnell Douglas, and they had a a four year training program, which I was involved in, and it was the best training I could have gotten. So, you know, the universe was taking care of me that day, I have to say. And that’s how I got into it. And we were doing mainframes back then. It was… Managed services was called timeshare then for those of you that want a history lesson.

[00:02:57] Scott Kinka:  You’ve seen all the waves. What’s kept you kinda interested and excited about what you’re doing through, you know, six, eight, 10 technology waves over the last couple decades?

[00:03:07] Tina Gravel:  The reputation of being a bit of a naysayer. Oh, they’ll never use this or they’ll never, oh, client server, that’s not going to work. Oh, the Internet, are you kidding me? It’s a toy. And I keep getting proven wrong. This time on AI, I’m all over it because I know better. I finally learned in my… Of the ending years here that I don’t have a good prediction, uh, knob on me. So I am just simply saying, you’re right. It’s happening. It’s gonna work.

[00:03:34] Scott Kinka:  If you look back over your… The various technologies that you’ve been involved in selling and the companies that you’ve been involved in leading and building go to market for, they’re all different technologies, but what’s what’s the thread that connects them all, you know, and in particular to the work that you do?

[00:03:49] Tina Gravel:  I always did direct sales for many years direct sales, and then I was asked by my… Our CEO at TerraMar years ago to run the channel, and I didn’t wanna do it. I really didn’t. I thought direct sales was where it was happening. But what happened was I had to learn how to reach beyond the company four levels out. You know. You have distribution, which of course is Bridgepoint’s claim to fame and then you have the channel partners and sometimes there’s another channel partner in the ecosystem. So it became how do I influence beyond my immediate, you know, workforce. Right? People that I can tell what to do. And it was a lot harder and it’s become a passion of mine because it is… You have to be creative and you have to come up with unusual ways of persuasion, you know. But what I will tell you is what I learned and the common thread in all the companies I seem to have worked for is that there’s always a new shiny object. It’s how you handle that and what… How you support your customers and your responsiveness that makes all the difference. Simple as that, you’d think everybody would just do it. People don’t even answer the phone anymore. When I answer the phone, it blows their mind. And then I tell the folks I tell folks don’t text them, pick up the phone. They look at me like a mess, but it has such a wonderful effect. An old fashioned thank you note nowadays. I know it sounds crazy, but they don’t expect it and they’re like, wow, you sent me a note. It’s old tiny? Yeah. But it works because it it brings that human relationship to a point that they can feel it.

[00:05:28] Scott Kinka:  One thing again, it shows effort over efficiency. Right? Everything that we’re doing is to do the same thing shorter, faster, better, cheaper, etcetera. You take a moment and, you know, there’s value in the interaction. I love that. Every technology leader has a moment that fundamentally changes their leadership philosophy or maybe establishes your leadership philosophy? What was that moment for you?

[00:05:53] Tina Gravel:  I was the the VP of sales at the company called Data Return, which then was acquired by TerraMark and then Verizon. So we went through a lot. And my, um, senior VP said to me… He said, you know, imagine if your team liked you, how much harder they’d work. You’re number one, but imagine what you could get out of them if they liked you. And I said, you don’t like them? And he said he said, you’re trying to get control everything, and you have people following you around like ducks doing the same thing, and you’re missing out on their special gifts. You’re missing out on their purpose and their gifts. And if you can manage to those gifts, you will do so much better. It was Mike Schiff. If you’re on here, Mike, listening, it was back in ’98, I think, and it completely changed the way I managed after that.

[00:06:43] Scott Kinka:  I got it. So what’s the takeaway? You’re an IT leader listening to this right now. What’s their takeaway from your moment?

[00:06:50] Tina Gravel:  It’s really easy. When you talk about efficiencies, it’s really easy to do that and sometimes we miss the humanity in our decisions. And so I would say, let’s don’t miss that because that to me is what’s going to make us different and better in the future with AI is that humanity, is the is the ability to see beyond the data and to understand what the human needs.

[00:07:16] Scott Kinka:  Profound. I like it. Tell me about what you’re doing now. So you’re at TierPoint. You know, certainly tell us a little bit about the company, short of a commercial, obviously, but, like, you know, tell me what are you doing at TierPoint? Tell me a bit about TierPoint people may not understand.

[00:07:27] Tina Gravel:  TierPoint has been in managed services for over twenty years. They started as a data center company. They still, you know, TierPoint sells massive data center with BridgePoint. I mean, there are some massive deals going on as we know with colocation, but we all do know that colocation is getting very scarce and so we’re leaning in, of course, we’ve been doing cloud now, private cloud, our customer sort of dragged us into managed services, so we can manage an IBM mainframe if you have one, we can manage private cloud, public cloud, we have DRaaS solutions, we actually grew up a security platform because we were trying to protect the managed customers and our customers said to us, well gee, can I use it on my on my site too? Does it have to just be just within your environment? And so now we’re selling that. So our customers have really dragged us into various technologies as time has gone on. We would take a leadership in an innovative approach them of course, but it was their idea, you know, we really need this, can you do it as a managed service provider that wants to please everybody, that’s how a lot of this happened. So now what we’re seeing is the subscription economy, right? We wanna buy we wanna buy hardware that way. We wanna buy software that way. We wanna buy, you know, you name it. I’ve got dog food coming in every month. Right? It’s that subscription economy that we’ve leaned on into and trying to get our customers to understand you don’t have to own everything yourself. And in fact, as with leasing a car, as with renting something, you are often better off depending on the waves of the technology you’re having to deal with and what you want as a business outcome.

[00:09:11] Scott Kinka:  So I wanna explore that for a moment. You guys have been through it. Right? Data center to cloud to cyber, you know, now to AI. And, obviously, all of the, you know, precedent product support the current ones. We wouldn’t be there without it. And as you said, said, data center… Traditional data center space is getting more scarce. But, you know, I give this talk… Our keynote at last year’s summit was about waves. Right? Wave comes in, hits the shore. You know, we’re all excited when it’s when it’s ramping up. Everybody talks about it. The board is excited about it. We don’t care, you know, we don’t care about the water that’s up on the beach right now, but that’s what’s running the business. That’s the commodity. Right? And then the next wave comes. We’re just kind of maybe in a lot of ways doomed to repeat the cycle, and that’s not an indictment of the technology. There’s an indictment of the way the business thinks about, manages, gets excited about, and invests in technology, I think particularly outside of the technologists in, you know, in general, you know, terms. Just taking that story for a moment and thinking about where we are today, I think particularly in cyber and probably even more importantly in AI. Are we doing cloud all over again? I mean, are we doing this kind of rush, invest, over inflate, and then figure it out later model again in your mind?

[00:10:24] Tina Gravel:  Boards are saying… They’re hearing about… Just like they heard about cloud. Okay? They’re hearing about cloud. They’re hearing about AI. The VP of IP says, well, you know, why not? He hears from a salesperson that there’s some great technology or he hears from AWS or Amazon, you know, even… Or might… You know? And he… Or, um, Azure, and he he just… He moves out. Okay? And so what we… We’re seeing now is that, especially the mid market which is our ICP, there are many customers that don’t even know what they’re paying for. Okay? So they’ll look at a bill and they can’t read it, and AWS will say, well, let me run it through my optimizer or Azure will say that too and those two are great companies. I mean, I endorse them wholeheartedly, but I don’t know that I’d have them analyzing my spend. So that’s we do. So we come in and we say, hey, you know, maybe if you get… Give us your bill, we’ll just take a look at it and then we’ll look at, you know, where you might be spending where you don’t have to and then we’ll take a step further because we’ve done 10,000 cloud migrations, we’ve got 2,000 cloud customers right now, we can help and that and that’s managing public cloud too. We can help them kinda get to a better use of what they’ve purchased. So to answer your question without the commercial part of it, the way it has happened with cloud, it is now what is the trough, you know, we’re in the trough, you know, disillusionment and security. Okay? Don’t even get me started on that. Security has so many vendors. I just came back from Black Hat. There are so many vendors that you can’t even find your own booth. I mean, it’s literally like a sea of vendor for a VP of IT, especially in mid market, what does he or she do? What do they do? So one of the approaches that we take and I think is a very good one, is that we look at what they’ve done and we say, don’t throw it out, but here’s the way moving forward you’re going to get better results. So it’s it’s an agnostic approach and people say agnostic, really? You’re selling something. Yes, we are selling something. We’d love for you to work with us for managing these technologies, but we have no problem telling you if something isn’t working to the best of its ability. We were first to market with Dell, first to market with Pure, first to market with with, like, Azure local, and we will tell you if we don’t think that those technologies are a good fit, and I think that’s what’s required. Don’t just be a vendor that’s coming in to sell your… Try to keep at least an open mind or at least focus on business outcome, because what we’ve done is we’ve abused the right to show up at that VP of IT now as a vendor because we’ve all come in and we’ve all said, you’re gonna be breached. You gotta have this or you’re gonna instead, let’s look at this holistically. That’s what we do and I’m proud of tier point because of that. Because I have been always had that everywhere I’ve gone.

[00:13:20] Scott Kinka:  Let’s talk a little bit about that buyer. Right? Because that buyer is your listener right now. In a lot of ways, you know, one of the things that I think about… You know, you… We mentioned cloud, we mentioned cyber, and now we’re talking about AI. It’s like, one of the things that constantly comes to mind as these new technologies roll out is, a, the IT person got into IT because they like shiny balls. Like, I’m in IT because I was… I made stuff as a kid. Like… And I wanna make more stuff. I wanna make… I wanna see things work. Right? So that’s the reason for getting in. So, of course, you wanna rush into these new technologies. You wanna spend that money. You wanna do those things. You have the double whammy of the board not understanding but going, oh, my company’s gonna be more valuable if I have this new thing. Neither of those things are outcome focused to your point. Just park that idea. Like, that’s kinda conditionally where we are. Now we keep repeating this cycle over and over again. I feel like sometimes it’s a little bit based on sort of our post COVID feeling around IT. Right? Like, April, May 2020, the CEO looked at the IT leader and was like, how do I save my company? And they did. Right? They figured it out. They sent people home. They made all kinds of crazy things happen. We invented whole industries, um, in a really short period of time. But now we keep kinda thinking, right, that, like, we turn to the IT person, and we’re like, how do I save my business this time? And, like, most IT people are not economists. You know what I mean? They’re they’re not finance people. So we still have this gap, like, this… Almost this expectation gap between, like, the, you know, between the board and between the rest of the c levels and the IT leader that they know what to do, that they know what it costs, that they know what it should cost and will cost over time. Do we still have a little bit of an expectation or maybe skills or frankly willingness gap… Interest gap in IT around, you know, budgeting, return on investments, etcetera?

[00:15:24] Tina Gravel:  I have such empathy for the leaders of IT in these… And and certainly in the the mid market enterprise because if you’re Jamie Dimon and you have thousands of people that are covering AI and cybersecurity, it’s a different conversation. But let’s talk about that. That VP of IT and mid market company, you know, he’s being told automate, automate, automate, and then a year later, why are you automating so much? You’ve spent so much, right? It’s having to pick your spots and then making sure that you… Whatever you pick. And so what they’re having to face now is not just a lack of resources because what you just said, you said something really interesting about the shiny object. People that work for him wanna go where the shiny objects are. He doesn’t always have them and, you know, I’d like to think that we help because we take on the things that are not sexy to support, right? You’re, you know, let me just run this for you in the background. These are these are things that are very important to the company, but they’re not necessarily full of sizzle. You know, a lot of times that’s what we’ll get. I mean, certainly, no offense to IBM, but running an IBM mainframe for somebody now is not exactly something that a young kid out of college wants to do. So, you know, we can take that on and then what they have left to play with, if you will, once we kinda save them and we kinda move that… Those resources off their plate, and send things that that might be better suited to a digital transformation and an outcome. But it’s it’s not easy. Like I said, I have a lot in.

[00:17:03] Scott Kinka:  I think each one of these waves, you know, has a different promise. Right? Too. Which is like… So the ROI that you’re trying to get at is different. I’m gonna ask you a cyber question because I know you’ve done quite a bit of work there, but I’ll I’ll couch it in the two other ways you’re talking about. We’ll go always to AI. AI is like, we’re gonna become more efficient. Every employee we have is gonna do more work, but etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. You know? And now IT is like, how do I even deal with the HR here? And, you know, like, there’s just a whole bunch of stuff that’s not kinda part of their job, but they’re going for efficiency. Now go the other way. Cloud was supposed to be this massive cost avoidance move. Only we didn’t necessarily understand the currency of, uh, of an hour on a server. Right? Because we didn’t… We we didn’t thought of things in absolute assets as opposed to, you know, consumption. Alright. Let’s go in the middle and just talk about cyber for a minute because this is the hardest one. This is like the insurance one. Probably the hardest are… There’s no promise. Like, the board’s not going, go get some more cyber. That’s awesome. You’ve often positioned cybersecurity as like a… As a value creation and a risk reduction motion rather than just like this stand alone IT thing. Right? So how should technology leaders redefine or think about ROI around security investments, you know, and resilience rather than simply another operating expense? How do you convince the board to invest in insurance?

[00:18:22] Tina Gravel:  There’s no question you’ll be breached, and you may be hit with ransomware. And if ransomware take… You know, has this… The ransomware is such that it’s locking up your data and you can’t do business, you know, there’s all kinds of terrible things that can happen. I don’t know if anybody watched The Pit, but there was a perfect description of that. Right? So it’s not just about protecting yourself from somebody coming in, it’s it’s the livelihood of your business. What would it do to you if you were down for a day? You know, it’s things like that. How much money would you lose? And then what is the effect on your brand? So with AI, we are seeing massive increase of people saying that brand is worth so much more because AI can simply find you online and and understand what you do if your brand isn’t successful that it will come right out right away, well, they’ve been sued, they’ve been this, they’ve been that, And so you may not even get a chance at bat with a company because your brand has suffered. So it’s it’s just more important than ever. It’s not simply a keystroke on the Internet anymore. It’s like massive data that’ll come back about you. So I look at it as a resiliency play, and we have created a platform where we’ve integrated lots of solutions to make it easier. That to me was key. The last cybersecurity I came from, which has an excellent product by the way, suffered because it did not have all of these other partners integrated in a playbook, if you will, for running cybersecurity in the company. And what we have is I’ve got a magic button in in a guy named Paul Mazuko. He’s our CSO and he he created all these things because he saw the risk. So he went and he found the best. And if it didn’t exist, he had it built in many cases because it wouldn’t do exactly what… You know, we had so many partners doing unusual things. Like, for instance, company that has, uh, actual ships out on the water, you know, telemetry involving measuring how they are being… How they’re protecting themselves in their communications and it’s very different when you’re moving from from satellite to solid to WiFi in a ship. Right? So things have to be created and done a little differently and that innovation again it came from operating things. It really did. He was operating as one of our executives trying to keep everybody safe, and so then the innovation came from that, and I think if people look at the innovation with AI and they focus on how is this going to affect the rest of the company. Is it just a point solution? Is it going to actually pull data the way I needed to pull and when the data comes over will it be accurate? I mean that’s a huge one because you can create every AI system in the world But if it’s not connected properly to your legacy systems, it’s going to be garbage in, garbage out. Right? So I don’t know if I fully answered your question about cybersecurity, but, uh, that was the idea. No.

[00:21:24] Scott Kinka:  No. I I love it. I I think it’s great. It… The… It’s just the challenge of of each one of these waves comes in the same way, and there’s just different expectations, the executive level and the finance level of what the return’s gonna be. And cyber is the hardest one, but it’s really at the basis of being able to deploy any of this other technology really at the end of the day. And so we’ll explore one more topic on currencies for a moment. So, like, we we… It’s just a phrase I’ve been using to describe because, you know, right now, we’re in this, like, oh my god. I know what a token is today. Like, and I’m burning more of them than I thought. And I’m like, yeah. You you know what an hour is on your server now too. That was ten years ago, but here we are. And then before that, it was a minute of voice, right, or a megabit of Internet. We really… You know, we were paying for them, but we really didn’t know what they meant in terms of productivity inside the business. But, you know, now we have a feel and that’s kinda settled down. Knowing it’s gonna be a little while before we settle down on AI, I wanna go back to cloud for a moment. Do we really understand as IT leaders in general what workloads cost us today? I mean, is the currency of cloud truly understood?

[00:22:28] Tina Gravel:  Variety average person has no idea what they’re reading when they look at their bill. I know this. I see it every day, and we have people that do. Now there are systems out there that you can use that’ll run, you know, a check of your bill, and and we do that too, and we find things very very quickly that way. That’s the kind of automation you can get, but the automation in and of itself is kinda like with the AI. What I was talking about is that without the human that has seen thousands of these implementations, you might miss something about your workload. Should this does this workload need to be adjacent? Do you need to be in two regions? Are you paying for more than you need? Can you live without this? You know, looking at just simple RTO and RPO, you know, in a resiliency conversation can lead to some savings with Cloud too. Because again, if they came at it from a fear based and they just bought two times everything, well, we know that that’s not good business. And again, we’ve seen lots of layoffs because of AI. Why is that happening? Because they weren’t prepared for the spend that they had with AI. So what I want to do is I want to uncover spend in cloud, even in colo. I mean, there are there are spends all over their organization that they probably have no idea they don’t need to be spending. You know? It’s not like rocket hero or whatever that we see. You have 24 subscriptions, and you only have seven. So I’m not gonna give you the car because you’ll… Because you said seven. It’s a little bit like that, but on a much more sophisticated and obviously technical, uh, approach, we’re going to surface these things. So we’re gonna surface things, like, immediately. Right? But that’s not gonna be the whole story.

[00:24:14] Scott Kinka:  Is it at the full circle moment right now? Right? Because we talked about that earlier. You know, the way we’re all excited, everybody’s talking about it, then we’re in the trough of disillusionment, and then, like, things run up on the beach. Right? We know what they’re worth. We know what they cost. But the money to fund everything out here is sitting out here, largely speaking, right, like, in the commoditized service. I think that that’s maybe a commercial for a work with a partner a little bit, right, to help you optimize that. Because the things we’re not paying attention to… I think I… I’ve read a stat. Uh, it was from Bain. Um, I’ve used it in some of my talks. You know, 80% of businesses have an AI initiative this year, and 80% of businesses didn’t see an increase in their IT budget in the same year. Like, this is the paradox of AI. The money’s gotta come from some place.

[00:24:57] Tina Gravel:  We do a a study every year. Um, it’s called, uh, the tier point twenty thirty report. In it, we identified from, you know, over 500 mid market customers that 84% are looking at at their cloud spend too. Wouldn’t that have been 02/2015 or… You know? No. It’s not because… And I think it’s because of this AI spend that’s going on. They’re starting to look at all of these other. To them, maybe public cloud is legacy now, and they’re looking at, okay, you know, am I getting the best bang for my buck? So one wave is affecting the other waves. No doubt. It’s just… They have the resources to do it, and they they largely don’t. And that’s where a partner can help because the great thing about Bridgepoint is that you have hundreds of partners that you can call upon to help with these various things, including TierPoint, you know. And, uh, uh, once again, I’m proud of what we can do. We’re not the end all be all and we’ll be the first to admit that if we can’t do something, we’ll we’ll send you and it’s nice I can go back to Bridgepoint and say, hey, we can’t do that, but I bet this company can because we we don’t.

[00:26:04] Scott Kinka:  You’ve done a lot of talking about women in tech. I know it’s a passion of yours. Um, you may not know. My oldest is a, uh, is a chief of staff at an IoT startup in Brooklyn. My middle daughter is in channel. I hate following in dad’s footsteps. And yet, right, like, when you and I made a mental note that we were talking about putting ourselves in the shoes of the IT person and you you referred to the IT person as he the entire time.

[00:26:31] Tina Gravel:  Yeah. I should’ve said he or she. I… I’m usually better at that. But

[00:26:35] Scott Kinka:  No. I’m I’m not coming at you. I’m I’m I’m more like… It’s more like a reflection of reality. Right? Tell us where we stand, you know, IT leaders who’s always like like, we need another middle aged crusty white guy like me and then on the management team, right, how do we change that? And tell us a little bit about some of the initiatives that you’re interested in working on the women in tech.

[00:26:53] Tina Gravel:  It has improved. Okay. Because you look at the pipeline coming up out of school used to be that we had… We didn’t have the candidates, and we do now. Okay? Not gonna get into politics, but we had… We were really making progress. And then, you know, we’ve had some initiatives the federal government didn’t agree with, you know, and so that was kinda pulled back. That’s okay. I think we have ways to go around this without having, you know, quotas and things if you want to look at it that way. There’s a lot of merit that we can see with having women and men, okay, and I am not a person that will say you must have a fully women organization. In fact, I am here to tell you that you need the yin and the yang to do it right. What women can bring from a collaborative standpoint and from, you know, I just see such great energy and so much intelligence coming up. I’m so proud of… I was at an event this past week and at the event I met three different women that were agents that took it upon themselves to create their own systems in, you know, things like lovable and things like that created to make their work better. Not so much easier, but to make it better. And I’m not seeing that everywhere and so, you know, my caution is don’t don’t overlook and you may have to do a little more work to find that woman because if you’re a man, there are broods of a feather. I understand that you don’t always golf with the woman, you don’t always hang with the woman, there’s all kinds of reasons why we don’t, right? Some its society and and the Me Too movement that kinda hurt things in that regard, but the bottom line is if you have to seek on them out a little bit more, all you have to do is say, hey, you know, I’d like to see a variety of candidates. I don’t just want everybody to be the same. I think we get diversity, diversity adds so much. I mean, and I’m in such as women, it’s diversity in races and nationalities. Um, you could be all of one thing and you’re not going to get the best work and the best outcomes. Simple as that. And we know this. So to answer your question, I support various organizations that do a lot for women around mentoring and around seminars and learning and how to ask for things and how to, you know, change the way they approach things so that they approach it in a, you know, a little different flavor, maybe more manly, you know, and not to be a man, but just to approach things differently because they were raised one way and, you know, their brothers were raised another. We do this work and I do it through several organizations. So Alliance of Channel Women, BAPT has something called the Women’s Leadership, which is phenomenal. I also started something called the Alliance of That started in London when I worked there. So we have in in Cloud Girls, which is a great group. So there are those groups that are out there that everybody is welcome to join. There is a process, you know, obviously, to to apply, but I think those affinity groups are where it’s at because that’s where they’ll get the the skills to take it to… So they can kinda go head on head… Head to head with whatever it is, an interview, a promotion, whatever.

[00:30:21] Scott Kinka:  First, I’m gonna go with some snippable moments. I’m gonna challenge you. I’m gonna ask you a couple of questions. They may be a little bit repetitive with some of the topics that we already went over, but I’m gonna challenge you to answer me in one sentence. What’s one question the board or the c suite should be asking their CIO or CSO about cybersecurity or AI that most boards are not asking.

[00:30:43] Tina Gravel:  If we were down, how much would it cost?

[00:30:46] Scott Kinka:  What’s the single most dangerous thing a nontechnical executive believes about AI that simply is not true?

[00:30:55] Tina Gravel:  AI won’t ruin humanity if we insert humanity throughout every process we build and every technology we use. Love that. What does a company actually gain

[00:31:09] Scott Kinka:  when it treats security as a business capability rather than a compliance obligation?

[00:31:16] Tina Gravel:  If they truly think about it as something that’s pervasive across their whole company, they will win.

[00:31:23] Scott Kinka:  I like that too. Okay. You took that completely literally once… I love it. Thank you. Uh, I love the… Sometimes people are like, I said this, but I need to qualify… No no qualifiers on this one. You did it right.

[00:31:35] Tina Gravel:  I don’t know if I like that one as much as I could because it really didn’t talk about cybersecurity, but it just goes across every technology.

[00:31:42] Scott Kinka:  Alright. Now we’re gonna have even more fun. This is called this or that. Alright? You just have to pick one. Chicago deep dish or New York style pizza?

[00:31:50] Tina Gravel:  New York style pizza.

[00:31:51] Scott Kinka:  Oh, wow. From Chicago. LinkedIn or face to face networking? I think I know the answer.

[00:31:56] Tina Gravel:  Face to face.

[00:31:57] Scott Kinka:  Chad GPT or Gemini?

[00:31:58] Tina Gravel:  Chat.

[00:31:58] Scott Kinka:  Okay. Public cloud or private cloud?

[00:32:01] Tina Gravel:  Public. Yeah. I think

[00:32:03] Scott Kinka:  I know the answer here too, but direct sales or channel sales?

[00:32:05] Tina Gravel:  Channel sales.

[00:32:06] Scott Kinka:  Partner recruitment or partner enablement?

[00:32:08] Tina Gravel:  Partner enablement.

[00:32:09] Scott Kinka:  This one you can clarify if you want, but I have… You have to give me 

the answer first. Expertise or curiosity?

[00:32:16] Tina Gravel:  Curiosity all day long.

[00:32:17] Scott Kinka:  Care to share anything on that or is your answer just very clear and definitive?

[00:32:20] Tina Gravel:  If you have a curiosity of spirit, if you will, you will automatically gain the expertise because you will learn because you’re interested and you want to learn.

[00:32:29] Scott Kinka:  And probably that has a lot to do with what… How you’ve survived over, you know, 15 different technology waves over, you know, a a multi decade career, which I appreciate that. Alright. I need a shameless prediction. It doesn’t matter if it’s in technology. It can be in sports. It can be in politics. Whatever you want. Just something that we’re gonna look back on twelve to eighteen months from now and figure out… See if you were right.

[00:32:52] Tina Gravel:  I really believe this subscription economy is going to get even more pervasive that we will see, you know, renting furniture is now done, right? You’re gonna be able to absolutely rent anything you’d like absolutely anything and pay a subscription, um, for that. It doesn’t matter what it is. Anything that you’ve thought… I mean, I just rented an outfit for a charity event.

[00:33:19] Scott Kinka:  My daughter does that for her work events. Yeah. I’m like… I… It cracks me up. She plans her outfits with her mother. She’s like, oh, Riley’s sending me her work. What are you reading right now? What’s on the nightstand? Business leadership? Fiction? Doesn’t matter. What what are you reading?

[00:33:31] Tina Gravel:  Friend of mine wrote a book and I’d like to give him a plug because it’s excellent. It’s called Digital Enablement. Dave Kramer wrote it with, uh, a guy named Brent Snyder. And curious about it is that it’s not just about enabling an application or whatever. He’s all about the fact that if you haven’t included your buyer’s thoughts and expectations, your your competitor’s gonna run all over you. So it’s more about looking… Like, I’ve been talking about looking at the big picture of not just automating this one thing.

[00:34:04] Scott Kinka:  You told me in… Before the show that you were excited to be on here. So you’ve seen other episodes, so you’re probably prepared for this question. But this is the end of the world question I’ve asked every one of our 108 guests at this point or whatever it is. We get to the end of what… Whatever dystopian future you choose and you are alone and your your phone is still operating, but only one app works. What is that app?

[00:34:28] Tina Gravel:  I really think it would be Teams, you know, because Teams or Zoom or whatever it is you use, I’d wanna be able to communicate to try to find people, to try to communicate, and there’s so much intelligence technology in there that I think I’d be able to find a way to communicate that way.

[00:34:43] Scott Kinka:  This has been incredibly enlightening and fun. Tina, I appreciate your time. Um, I wanna end with two quick questions. One is for the listeners who found this interesting… As interesting as I did, They wanna follow your work or read your writings or connect with you. What’s the best way to do that?

[00:35:00] Tina Gravel:  You know, our company is toyourpoint.com. We have everything you could imagine on the website, and you can find me at LinkedIn, t gravel, out of Chicago. And I’d love to interface with you and to talk more about… Especially about about this whole idea of technology optimization and my love of advancing women in this field.

[00:35:20] Scott Kinka:  Love that. So here’s the last one. Throughout the entire conversation, we’ve talked about leadership and translating technology into business value and trust. I mean, if you had to capture your leadership philosophy in a single sentence, what would it be?

[00:35:35] Tina Gravel:  Let people be who they are, meet them who they are, and take it from there. Whether it’s a customer, whether it’s an employee, whether it’s your boss, you gotta accept you’re not gonna change anybody. So you need to to go with it. And, um, you can always make choices around that, but you have to accept people for who they are. Absolutely.

[00:35:59] Scott Kinka:  I love that we have a phrase around here, and you can take the first word to mean many things, but I’d rather be rich than right. And by rich, we mean relationships and fulfillments and, of course, all the monetary pieces around that, but right doesn’t get you very many place. So I love the idea that you shared with starting with… Well, you know, meet people where they are. Great concept to add into that. Thank you for the sage, uh, advice there, Tina. I appreciate it. This has been a great conversation. I had a blast. I hope you did as well, and I’m sure the listeners gained a lot from it.

[00:36:28] Tina Gravel:  You. Take care.

[00:36:29] Scott Kinka:  Alright. You got it. That is a wrap on this episode of the Bridgecast. If today’s conversation gave you or listener something to think about, please hit subscribe, leave us a review, share it with your team, get Tina’s sage wisdom out there to your team members, and, uh, meet them where they are. We’ll see you soon in another episode of the Bridgecast. Listen. If you made it this far, there must have been some good content, or you’re just a fan or a relative of mine. In either case, we appreciate you spending your most valuable asset with us, your time. We don’t take that lightly. We’d We’d also like to say one more time that we’re appreciative of Bridgepoint Technologies and their belief and sponsorship of this show. We hope that if you or someone you know is thinking about your company’s digital transformation or simply the next IT project that you may not have the resources, budget, or time to get to, I’m sure that Bridgepoint, one of the country’s fastest growing technology advisory and procurement firms, can help. Check out bridgepointtechnologies.com. Don’t forget the e on Bridgepoint, or simply reach out to me at Skinka, skinka,@bpt3.net. Also, take a minute, please, if you would, to give us a five star review on your favorite platform. It helps give us the visibility to reach other people like you. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Bridge. I’m Scott Kinka. And until next time, there’s a lot of noise out there in business and in life. Do what you can to be the signal.