From Reactive IT to Business Partner: Modernization and AI Readiness with Andreas Diamanti and Alex Danobrega

# From Reactive IT to Business Partner: Modernization and AI Readiness with Andreas Diamanti and Alex Danobrega

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:00:00) I don't think there's anything worth doing if there's no chance of failure, because that means you're not taking on a challenge that's big enough that you could fail. If you're doing it and there's no chance of failure, it's too easy, and you should probably do something else. Storage to me needs to be scalable to the degree that we can ensure that there's enough storage there to be able to leverage when we need it, but not to be billed at the full storage capacity. So sort of like providing on-prem infrastructure that represents cloud billing models.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:34) So just to jump right into it, we're talking with Alex and Andreas today. And Andreas, could you go ahead and introduce yourself?

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:00:41) Yeah, sure. Andreas Diamanti. I am the General Manager of IT at the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:49) And Alex?

(Alex Danobrega at 00:00:50) My name is Alex Danobrega. I'm from Champions of Change, and I'm an HPE partner.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:56) And when you say surgeon, you mean like physical surgery, doctor surgeons?

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:01:00) Yeah, exactly. You go to university to do your doctorate, and then if you want to specialize in surgery, then you'd come to our college to get that extra qualification. That's why it takes, you know, to your mid to late thirties to become a surgeon, because it's a lot of training even post-university to get accredited as a surgeon.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:20) Yeah. And how did you get into that type of IT work with the surgeons?

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:01:25) Oh, well, I came mainly from aviation and cloud background. There's a little bit of oil and gas in my history as well. But largely speaking, it was lucky coincidence. I ran into a person who knew the CEO of the college and learned that I'd just returned from overseas to Australia and was looking for work. And she called me within a couple of days. We had a chat. They really needed support to pivot their IT function. It was very much a reactive service provider that was dealing with incidents and projects as they arose, as opposed to any kind of proactive partnership or strategic planning. So they wanted—initially, they wanted someone to come in and help them to understand what the issue was, and that led into a broader two-year program.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:15) And then when you first went in there, were you planning on modernizing everything? Like, what was the—you wanted to move from reactive to proactive. That was the main goal for you going into this?

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:02:28) Yeah. At the beginning, it was more like, we want a report on what you think we should do, and there was initially a six-month request. But within three weeks of me joining, I realized very quickly the way that tech was functioning was not in service to the business. It was very much—even the transformation program at the time was perceived as a technology initiative as opposed to a business initiative. So within three weeks, I was like, you don't need a report. You need action. Otherwise, these things are going to—leaving the projects that were in tow are going to go, for lack of a better word, sideways pretty quickly. So I pitched that what we need is an organizational restructure. You need to outsource all of the maintenance activity, like the BAU, so you can focus your internal IT team on proactive partnership, business innovation, on roadmap development and planning, and on continuous improvement. They were very much project-focused, so their target state wasn't really well understood. It was like every project delivered its own thing without sort of alignment with a larger objective. And yeah, so within three weeks of that, it was noticed. Within a month of that, we'd already started working on the project. It took about eighteen months in total to complete.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:37) And how did you meet Alex during that project?

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:03:39) I believe—I don't know how the initial contact happened, but I know that Broadcom bought out VMware, and then VMware was going to increase our prices by hundreds of percentage—400% or something like that. So we were up for a bill of roughly $300,000, and we were looking for alternative solutions to deliver the VMware capability for our on-prem infrastructure whilst not absorbing that cost, because we would have had to sign another three years, and then we would have been stuck with VMware for another three years. That's what would have happened if we had to buy it, because we couldn't buy a shorter term. So we were looking for alternatives. And what happened was when Champions of Change was brought in, it wasn't like—so, what are our options? is the kind of approach Alex took and weighed up different technology solutions that could address the cost reduction focus while also giving us the scalability we needed as we were depreciating a lot of our old .NET, twenty-year-old technologies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:38) Yeah. Let's talk a little bit more about this. So what specifically was this being used for, and how did this—I understand the concept of your bill was getting increased and so you started looking. But tell me more about what exactly you were using that technology for. Like, where did that fit into your world?

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:04:56) Yeah. So we've got a large cloud footprint, but we also have a fairly large on-prem footprint for some of our twenty-year-old .NET technologies. We're a hundred-year-old college, right? So there's a lot of legacy stuff that exists because back in the day, you couldn't procure these solutions off the shelf. You had to build them. So we do have a lot of those technologies that we built, and some of those are regulatory required as part of the surgical profession, and some of those are more about training. So how do you log the training activity you've done and provide that as evidence so that you can become essentially qualified as a surgeon? Those technologies are going to remain for a while, and we do have a program to lift them off of that on-prem and move them into cloud solutions, but they're going to remain on-prem for a long time. We also have an on-prem footprint. I don't think we're intending on getting rid of it. It's just more that some of these legacy technologies need to go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:49) What other solutions did you evaluate when you were looking at these?

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:05:54) Yeah. So we looked at HPE GreenLake, and we also looked at Azure Local. It wasn't the ultimate choice to go GreenLake. It wasn't really a cost-motivated decision. It was more of a maturity-motivated decision. The product itself and the interaction from my staff with it—it was more of a cloud UI, but it was more mature as a product offering as well. We had a few risks with some of our backup solutions with the Azure Local that weren't necessarily going to work, which means we'd have to run another stream of work to remove those and replace those with other things. So there were a few key dependencies on looking at Azure Local that didn't necessarily exist with the more mature version of the HPE solution.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:35) And then, Alex, so you're at Champions of Change, and that's an HPE partner, correct?

(Alex Danobrega at 00:06:42) Yes. So we've been a partner for ten-plus years now. We mainly focus on implementation and architectural design. So we look at the whole business in a sort of holistic way to make sure we're not missing any components. And we also adhere to the CIO requirements. So rather than just talking about tech, we look at the other aspects that are important for business to make that decision. And I think that's kind of the foundation on why we've been so successful in the last ten-plus years.

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:07:11) And to be honest, Alex did look—we were focused on our on-prem stuff, but Alex, at Champions of Change more broadly, looked at our DR solution and came up with a broader roadmap to replace things that will save us roughly $2.1 million over the next five years. So we've already done phase one, and we're going to do phase two early next year. So it wasn't just solve this particular problem. Alex looked more broadly at the end-to-end environment and proposed solutions that were not necessarily in the scope of the initial project, but now we have a phase-two project, which does include that scope.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:45) So Alex is a smart guy?

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:07:47) Yeah. Yeah. He just—yeah. It was one of those projects that—there's a number of projects that, you know, 20% of the projects do up 80% of your time because they're not going that well. Alex's project in particular, I didn't have to think about it much. The biggest issue we had was a $5,000 overspend, which wasn't too much of a concern on the broader thing. So that was—if that's the biggest issue you got, then we're doing quite well. So it was really good to not have to worry about that project. It just kind of went along and got done on time and on schedule, which is good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:17) So you took a chunk of responsibility and then delegated it over to Alex and the team—is that correct?

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:08:23) Yeah. I mean, I was in the steering committee, obviously, and I drove some of the decision-making, and I think that accountability is necessary. I don't think that I would've just let them run off and do it without any kind of cadences to make sure that they're on track. That's not what I would suggest, but it wasn't something that I had to get highly involved in because it was going off the rails. It was just kind of something that happened almost at a BAU level where it just ran, and I didn't have to really think about it outside the steering committee.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:47) Alex, what was your favorite part of the project?

(Alex Danobrega at 00:08:49) My favorite part? Well, everything. But I think before I answer the favorite part of the project, the thing that wasn't important is because we're dealing with critical infrastructure—so the production environment. And when you're project managing from beginning to end, it is quite a stressful situation because you don't want to have a lot of downtime. You want to think about the users and the staff and so on. So that, I think, in terms of favorite part, was the RACS communication to Champions of Change and HPE. So even though the project went super smoothly and amazingly, I don't believe it would have been possible if the RACS team wasn't so hands-on and so well communicative. So the way they handled things were really well handled, and they managed things really properly. So that, I think, was part of my, I would say, favorite—just how they communicated as well.

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:09:43) Good call-out. Yeah. I remember UAT. We gave people a lot of lead time. We used a very good analogy. People were concerned about this project. They're like, how come you're doing this and you're not giving us enough time? Like, guys, we're essentially relaying a road here, and you're still going to drive your cars on it. We're not changing the cars. We're not changing what you do. You're going to have to check your car still works on the road, and they did that in UAT, and that went well. But I think there were concerns about changing the underlying infrastructure because to them, that was the foundation upon which things were built. But we helped them to understand that this is fairly low risk. It's been done before. And the other benefit—and that was more business UAT side. The way that we articulated this to the executive leadership team was more around, unlike software-based projects, which are very difficult to calculate ROI on because they're business-facing, and it's always hard to make sure you get the return that you're expecting. With an infrastructure replacement program like this, we knew—it's a hardware thing mainly, and we knew that the cost was going to be less than what we had today. There's no ifs, buts, or doubts about it. We're running—the road is costing us this much today. Once we replace the road, it's going to cost us that much, and that was basically it. So it was really—it was easy to communicate at both the executive level and the business level.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:00) Now you came into this project, and you accomplished the goal that you were looking to accomplish, Andreas?

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:11:07) Yeah. Yeah. Phase one. Anyway, phase one to me is an enabler for phase two, which is the broader program that Alex pitched, which is the DR side, and that's where we're going to save a lot of the money. So we had to do this side first. But the enablement of the other side is critical.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:23) What's that acronym you're using?

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:11:25) Oh, disaster recovery. Sorry. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:28) Okay.

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:11:28) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:28) So this is handling the disaster recovery side of things.

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:11:32) Yeah. So obviously, the first thing was get our on-prem resized, built correctly, and then now it's about, okay, how do we resize the disaster recovery end of that so that it's driving similar cost savings? And the reason that there's a lot more cost savings on that side is mainly because the DR is hosted by a third party. So if you reduce your footprint a lot with what Alex and Champions of Change put together, then we can reduce those partner costs significantly as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:59) When you were looking for a partner, obviously, you chose Alex and them. But when you were evaluating other partners, what did you like? What did you not like? I mean, not necessarily the technology. I'm talking about from the business side of things.

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:12:13) I felt it was objective. That's what it came down to for me. Obviously, we have a lot of other partners, and they specialize in certain things, or they're from certain companies. We have a Microsoft partnership. We have an HP partnership, but Champions of Change was obviously an independent third party, and that's what we wanted. We wanted an objective view of these things. And that's why when it was pitched, it wasn't, hey, here's an HP solution to your problem. It was, what are the solutions out there, and what are the pros and cons of those? And ultimately, we did choose HP. I guess we could have chosen another product, but that was the one that scaled the best for us and provided those things I said earlier.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:49) Did you pick Champions of Change, or were they already there?

(Alex Danobrega at 00:12:53) No. So we were pretty new to Royal Australasian. And when we came in, I think they were at the brink of time. If they didn't make a decision, they were going to pay that massive bill for VMware. And I think they were talking to other partners for the last two years. But all the other partners didn't really give the big, holistic answer to their problem. They just said, here's a product. Do you like it? No. And then it never moved forward. And I feel like when we came in and we spoke to the RACS team, we said, hey, let's look at all your options. Not only HPE, obviously. Just tell me the business problem. It's not about the product. It's about the problem. So what's your—what's the problem that you have? How can we address it? And then obviously, HPE was the right solution, but we talked more about the business rather than the tech. Because tech is tech, but what are we trying to solve? And I think that helped them make the decision, and then it was right in the right time, and things just went as they should have, and it just worked out.

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:13:53) I think it was my infrastructure manager that found you. It wasn't me, I don't think. Was—

(Alex Donobrega at 00:13:57) Yes. So I've done other works for Rex. I've saved some money around your cloud backup, some other things as well in the last few months before this one.

(Alex Donobrega at 00:14:09) Smaller things. And then when it came time to talk about your critical infrastructure, I think you guys already had some confidence in Champions of Change, and you're like, "Well, what do you propose?" And then we put all... We did hundreds of hours on ROI calculations. We looked at the market, what the cloud comparison looks like, what other products look like.

(Alex Donobrega at 00:14:30) We did analysis on the percentages, future growth, how will that look like in five years. So we did a proper report, and I think that painted the picture for the business, and it helped them make the decision, I think, high level.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:43) I like that. Alex, he's very outcome driven. Everything I do entrepreneurially, you have to learn. And also at the executive level, right, Andreas, the people who are the top 1% of the top 1% are the people who are just obsessed with outcomes, and they just keep drawing the line: Here's the action I'm taking. Here is how it directly connects to the outcome. That's the hardest thing to do, isn't it?

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:15:05) Yeah. Getting that messaging right, because as an executive, you're essentially making decisions without understanding the lower level details. So how do you articulate... How do you get the message so that they can make the decision without understanding that detail is a very hard thing to balance. Because you want to give them the confidence, you want to give us the confidence that we're making the right decision, but I don't know anything about hypervisors and all that stuff. But the way that it was pitched and so on, it is the message I needed to make that decision.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:33) I think your background's kind of interesting. Andreas, can you share a little bit about what you like to do professionally as far as going into organizations and improving them?

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:15:43) Yeah. So I came mostly from a consulting background. I ended up abroad for a decade across Dubai and Switzerland. In that capacity, mainly what I do is... If I had to pick a niche, it would be I look at IT operating models, and I find a way to make them more efficient, and I pivot internal IT functions to be more business oriented. What I did find... Because I spent so many of my years in consulting, the first global head of IT role I had was a permanent role, which I'd never done before. I'd never done an internal permanent role.

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:16:18) And when I got there, I very quickly realized that IT can become very inward facing and think that they exist independently. But really, if the business doesn't exist, the internal IT function doesn't exist. So how do you orient that team to focus on business outcomes and then drive value for them? Because we're not expecting them to be technology people, but it's a critical enabler. So I would say that's my niche. And then how do you... Once that operating model is in place, how do you add the services on top of that? So continuous improvement. How do you do strategic planning?

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:16:56) How do you upskill the business so that they can start to understand what a forward plan looks like and identify dependencies and stuff like that as well? Yeah. I think that would be my focus when I come into a sort of an IT function. How do you do it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:10) Is it just like conversation? You organize your thoughts and then you start socially selling it? Do you hire new people? Do you get rid of certain people? Like, how do you actually effectively go in and make that change? Organizational change is so difficult. Behavior change is so hard. How do you do it?

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:17:26) Yeah. Good point. I mean, first things first. The initial pitch is more around how is the IT functioning today and what's the value of pivoting that IT team to be a different skill set than what exists today. And that might need hiring of new people. You do need to figure out if the skills of the existing staff can deliver on those expectations. Because if they've been, let's say, looking down for a long time, just doing the work that comes across their desk, and you're asking them to look up and face business stakeholders and that type of engagement, that's almost a... Can be a different type of personality or a different type of skill set. So that assessment kind of needs to be well understood when you're reviewing your existing team and seeing if they have the skills to deliver on that or if you need a new team.

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:18:10) So that would be that part. But in terms of pitching, obviously, cost is a big part of that. So is there going to be a material reduction in cost doing this? And if it's not that, then you have to articulate the value. And in my experience, the value is the strategic planning of it. The value is helping the company to have a plan beyond the next twelve months. It's very common in my experience that plans are twelve-month budgeting cycles rather than three-year strategically motivated actions with understanding dependencies and all that stuff as well, along with the capacity of the organization to actually deliver on a lot of that stuff. So I would think that, yeah...

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:18:59) One is understanding the skills, teams, the way they operate today, and if that's an efficient way of working for the value you're trying to drive. And the other one is pitching why the change is necessary to executives so they can make the investment necessary. Because make no mistake, these things don't happen for free. It takes investment. And when I say that, I mean I hired a very brilliant organizational change manager.

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:19:21) That's a person who I'd take her everywhere with me if I could. So, you know, I have a very experienced project manager to keep this thing on track and stuff like that. It's not Andreas in a vacuum executing this thing by himself. I'm successful because I know how to identify the right people to execute on that particular program of work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:40) Sounds like he'll be taking Alex with you too.

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:19:42) Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was just about to say that ironically. But yeah. Look. I think some of those things are critical. I don't think you can run an operating model transformation without an organizational change manager because it's not just an internal IT change. It impacts everything across the business because IT is a group's function that sits across everything, which means that if you're changing the way of working, you are going to impact in-flight projects, you know, BAU, change management that's currently going on outside of the IT transformation in regards to business stuff. So I think, yeah, it can't be...

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:20:22) For stuff... For things like this, you need a really good, strong OCM, organizational change manager to deliver on it for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:32) Yeah. One thing I didn't realize earlier in my career that I realize now is when I was a great engineer and I would look up and I would say, "Oh, I could be the CTO of that company," I didn't realize what I didn't have. And one of the biggest things I didn't have was a huge network of people that I have been through the fire with and I've done projects with, and I know they can deliver. And we can say, "Yeah. We... It's a big bet financially, but we know Alex can come through, or we know HP can come through or whatever it is." And that to me now when I look at people like you, Andreas, and I'm thinking about you, I'm like, yeah. He's got a brilliant network of people who he's executed high-stakes projects with so that you're not just pulling Andreas as an individual. You're pulling all of his experience and all of his network in with you.

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:21:21) 100%. And that was hard to do because I spent a decade abroad, so I built all these networks in Europe and asking them to move to Australia. It seems like a bit of a stretch. So I had to do that here again. So how do you do that? And, yeah, that's just relationship management. Look. I think consulting helps. Being in presales helps in terms of how to articulate yourself, how to articulate value, and find the right team. So I don't want to suggest that it's an easy thing to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:49) Did you do any planning for the surgeons with AI?

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:21:52) Yeah. So we wrote an AI strategy. I think in terms of where that's at, it's... We're... What we're doing is we wrote an AI strategy initially, which had a combination of... We took... I took the NVIDIA four-layered cake model, and I... Which was very much about power infrastructure and all that from a NVIDIA perspective, but I took the principle and relayed the foundational elements, the operational elements, the... That's right. The foundational elements, the enabling elements, the operationalization elements, and the innovation elements, and I laid out a plan to build those things that you could deliver on AI. But once I pitched it, it became very clear that data was the foundation of a lot of this, and we needed to focus on that first. So right now, we're in the midst of finalizing the data strategy, which has gone on about two or three reviews now.

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:22:43) It'll go for final executive endorsement next week, actually, ironically. But if we can get the data foundations right, we're very conscious that we can get the AI strategy right. So a lot of it is around just building out what those foundations look like. And that's just a lot of technology element. A lot of that is how do you embed... What's the operating model? This goes back to operating models again for data. How do you embed data stewardship and champions within the college? How do you operationalize that into the roles so that people take ownership of the data they're entering? Because it's a very big perception that IT owns all the data. And I think that perception needs to change. We help...

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:23:22) We make sure it's stored and secure, but we're not the ones who necessarily understand the data because we're not using it operationally, so that needs to be owned and articulated by the business. So that change management piece in and of itself is going to be quite significant, and maybe we need the OCM for that too. But I think data strategy is, like I said, just more broader than technology. We can get the technology elements right. We don't get the data operating model right. It's not going to be successful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:49) Help me understand that a little bit more. So when we talked, I think last week, you were talking about fixing the data first before going into AI. When we're talking right now, you're talking a lot about the operational of the data and ownership. Help me understand, like, paint a picture for me. When you walked in, where was the data, and then what is fixing the data mean?

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:24:09) Yeah. Okay. So right now, this is very much like what I said about projects earlier. So right now, we've built, let's say, analytics solutions which are fit for purpose for their particular use case, but aren't able to be used more broadly. And what I mean by that is that we have... Instead of doing town planning and then building all of our houses in the quarter to the town plan, we've gone and just built individual houses. And then none of the streets make sense. They don't line up. You can't reuse this road because you've gone and built that road over there. And like, it...

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:24:42) None of it connects well, and that's kind of the land we're in at the moment. So a lot of the data strategy and that foundation element is about getting a common language and storage and data design that serves the college. So you have, for example, if there's an ID for a particular member, that ID is a single source of truth that everybody leverages rather than being replicated across the 400-odd reports that we have. So change management becomes a bit of a nightmare and data quality issues. The manual overhead in managing that, and I don't mean just in IT, I also mean business staff, is significant.

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:25:20) Remediating that will go a long way even without AI just to making information—let's not say data. Data will be there, but the information they need accessible so they can actually make intelligent decisions on the back of it. And you don't want to bite off a comp... That's not the only project in the college as well.

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:25:37) So it's like, how do you operationalize this thing and build out those foundational elements whilst still having to run BAU and execute on other in-flight projects? It's a bit of a minefield, but a lot of it comes down to understanding the capacity of the teams. And planning that out is what we're in the process of doing as part of the data strategy in the broader three-year roadmap.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:58) So from your level, when you're... Any technologist, and they'll say, "Yeah. That needs to be done. You have to do it." But when you go to allocate that project against other business outcomes, like other things, how do you quantify it? Do you not necessarily need to have an exact ROI and quantify it and decide how much time and budget you're going to spend on it because you just know it has to be done? Or like, how does that decision actually get made?

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:26:26) What we're going to propose right now is that we know as part of the technology roadmap what the business priorities are. So we know what the business wants to achieve over the next three years. So there's a technology roadmap to deliver on those expectations. Some of those are internally motivated and some of those external influences like government regulation or whatever.

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:26:47) So it has to be done. You don't have a choice. There's some sort of mandate for that. And then on top of that, you also want to get... Do the data strategy and the data foundation. So the approach I'm taking is very much, okay, we're going to allocate a certain proportion of our team to the data strategy, which has a certain amount of funding envelope over that period of time, and we would deliver whatever we can within that funding envelope in that capacity. Rather than attempting to, once again, like I said, bite off more than we can chew and try to deliver the data strategy all very quickly as one single program of work. I think it's... It would be...

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:27:24) In theory, the right way to approach this would be to do the data strategy foundations first and then build everything else, but that's an unrealistic expectation. So we have to be more pragmatic and trying to get down to the minutiae of every single stream of work and how much it's going to cost is an endless piece of work that you never get concrete on. Whereas the approach to say, okay, we're going to T-shirt size this thing, have a funding envelope, have a certain amount of capacity dedicated to it, and then deliver on those foundations over that period is a more pragmatic way to do that when you're fleshing out a three-year roadmap.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:00) Do you see other technology leaders being pressured into AI?

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:28:05) I see a lot of marketing for AI. I think it's very hard. I see a lot of use cases that are prototypes that never make it into production or POCs that don't make it into production. I'm yet to see a productionized solution from somebody I know. I mean, I'm an individual, so I don't want to suggest that that's representative of the broader market. But I haven't seen a specific use case outside of research myself. And when I say that, what I mean is I met somebody at a company who reduced the hiring of their workforce by something in the order of 70% by using AI for research. But that problem that they are facing now is similar to the problem in the IT world where developers are being halved, let's say. But the only way to become an architect is through the development work.

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:29:01) You can't become an architect without doing development, but the pathway to become an architect is being removed if you're removing that pool of developers. So similar challenge in their industry as in ours, I think that would be the only concrete use case I've seen where it's produced meaningful value.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:19) What advice would you give other CIOs, CTOs about balancing innovation, cost, risk, long-term priorities?

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:29:26) For me, I would... Two things. One, focus on what the business wants to achieve, but I think it's also... When I say... When you look at your business and not take our IT out of it for a second.

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:29:35) When you look at your business operational model, where are the biggest inefficiencies in that model and target everything towards those so that you can either make yourself more efficient or reduce the number of people needed to perform the activity so you can get it done quicker. It seems a bit harsh. Have it end? I think time to value is becoming so much more critical for businesses across the globe that if we don't take that action to reduce the time to value, we're going to get left behind in a lot of ways. As a...

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:30:07) When I say we, I mean the company in question, whoever that might be. Yeah. Rax or otherwise.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:13) Alex, tell me a little bit about what you guys do with HPE Storage.

(Alex Danobrega at 00:30:18) I think a lot of projects don't go well usually because either the business doesn't have a clear understanding where they want to go, or if they do, there's way too many people trying to make a decision which blocks the other person's idea. And I feel like with Rax and Andreas, obviously, no one's perfect. I'm not perfect, but they had a pretty clear idea. This is what we want to achieve. This is where we want to go.

(Alex Danobrega at 00:30:42) Can you help us? And then the other thing with Andreas is quite a straight shooter. So if he doesn't like something or there's something that doesn't make sense, he would just tell you. And I feel like a lot of people nowadays, and this is my perspective, sometimes feel afraid to say something. And they just leave it, and then they don't mention it.

(Alex Danobrega at 00:30:59) And that makes it really hard for a partner or for any other person in the business to help because when you go to a doctor if you just say hey I'm kind of hurt here I think but you don't give the full intel, they can't help you with a solution. Right? So I've got to give credit to Andreas as well because he was very straightforward. He had a clear vision, very proactive.

(Alex Danobrega at 00:31:20) And I think as a CIO or someone in leadership, I think those traits make a big difference on any project that you do with anyone. It's not even with a partner. It can be with a CIO internally, helping them and taking the business to the right path. So I think... And I think a lot of people don't talk about that about...

(Alex Danobrega at 00:31:39) Because they just talk about tech. They talk about other things. But I think certain traits that certain people have make a huge difference on a project. So I just wanted to share that a bit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:49) I think we're being too nice to Andreas, to be honest with you.

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:31:51) No. No. It's true. It's true.

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:31:56) There's a... Like, if you let... If you don't deal with something when it's a small little lizard, it will manifest itself into a dragon and take you out. So you need to deal with the problems as they arise or they will become too big to deal with. So, yeah, I think that's basically that. That's why I'm honest because I've seen things that I...

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:32:16) I've definitely, I think, made some failures in my life where I haven't addressed something as it's happened. You learn that lesson pretty quickly. I think... Yeah. And that's all...

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:32:25) And I don't want to say that's a career thing. That's also a life thing and relationships, all that stuff. Like, I think at the end of the day, you've got to deal with the problems as they arise. It'll manifest themselves into something massive.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:34) At the last business I started, we had one of our core values that we don't sweep things under the rug and that we shine a light into the dark. Anytime there's ever a feeling of we're sweeping this under the rug or that there's a dark spot, we want to shine a light on that.

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:32:48) It's the analogy. Like, if you get a bill for your electricity bill, it's just a bill at that point in the pay envelope. But if you leave the envelope on your desk for six months, it's going to turn itself into a court case. That's right.

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:33:00) You know what I mean? You deal with the problem when it arises. So...

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:03) All right. Let's do a little bit of work with the HPE storage here. Alex, do you have any experience... We'll start with the easy question. Do you have any experience with HPE storage?

(Alex Danobrega at 00:33:12) Of course. I think HPE storage is one of the best market leaders in the market at the moment. So we do sell a lot of HPE storage, and that is via CAPEX, which is just upfront payment, or the GreenLake solution, which is a pay per use, monthly billing path.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:29) Okay. So you pay... Explain to me this connection between GreenLake and HPE storage and how all that works.

(Alex Danobrega at 00:33:36) So HPE GreenLake, basically, it's a stack. So you get your switching, your storage, and your servers. And, obviously, depending on the solution that you want and the sizing, you are able to pick that. And then in terms of utilization, you can pick 80% of a storage. So to make a simple math, let's say you have a 50 terabyte storage and you only want to utilize 80% of it, so you only pay for 80%.

(Alex Danobrega at 00:34:07) But in your data center, the storage has more than you're utilizing. So if at some point you want to use more, you just pay per gig on that consumption.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:17) So the storage and HPE GreenLake, they go hand in hand. Why do you recommend them? It seems like you're talking positively about them. You recommended them because they were the right objective solution for Andreas. But do you use storage a lot, and do you recommend it for a reason other than...

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:34) Because storage is pretty basic. Right? Like, they're all... A lot of storages are really similar.

(Alex Danobrega at 00:34:38) Yeah. I think you're right. Storage is basic, and you can... We can talk about speeds and feeds. And there's probably even other products that are pretty amazing too.

(Alex Danobrega at 00:34:48) But when we sell a solution and personally from my perspective with HPE, when you're selling a storage, let's say, you're not only selling that device, you're selling the ecosystem. So you're selling the resources. You're selling the support. You're selling the channel. You're selling the partners that are trained and certified for it.

(Alex Danobrega at 00:35:07) So with our business at Champions of Change, we're highly certified and I would say probably one of the highest certified in Australia for HPE. And that's the whole business suite. Not only for storage, it's GreenLake and other components. And that... What gives us is the power to be knowledgeable.

(Alex Danobrega at 00:35:25) And for companies like Rax, they're busy doing their own internal strategies and they have their own fires they have to deal with and they have to do their own other things that gets really busy. And we're all human, so we don't have 24 hours a day to do everything. And I think as a partner and working with HPE, it allows us to be knowledgeable so we have the eyes and ears for companies like Rax. And because we're knowledgeable, we can give the right advice. And I think knowledge is power in a world of where there's too much noise.

(Alex Danobrega at 00:35:58) And if you know your stuff, you can give the right advice and you can make decisions much more faster. And that's why I like HPE personally because they have... I feel like every company has the room to improve, but they've nailed the way they've built their channel model. And they support partners like myself to elevate us and to be more knowledgeable so then we can do a better job to help our customers. So I think when I talk about storage, it's not all about storage.

(Alex Danobrega at 00:36:24) There's other components that all come in alignment to why HPE is one of the solutions that we would advise to go with.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:32) Were you engineer first?

(Alex Danobrega at 00:36:33) No. So I started in sales, just basic sales. And over the years, I just got quite frustrated with how techs, certain techs, answer certain questions. So they would either go too deep on the technical side or they would just mock because you're in sales. Like, oh, I don't know what you're talking about.

(Alex Danobrega at 00:36:50) I don't need to teach you about it. So then I made it my mission to learn about tech. So I did certifications. I went to events to learn about it. I did after hours.

(Alex Danobrega at 00:37:00) I did courses, training. So then when I'm talking to a customer, even though I'm in sales, I wanted to be at a level where I'm presales, even solution designing. So now I work with techs in my team, and I help them design things because I understand it now. But it took me eight years to get to that point and of full focus, like F1 precision, learning and training. Yeah.

(Alex Danobrega at 00:37:22) And also looking stupid because to learn, I had to ask really dumb questions, and I had to put myself out there. And I think that's how I became pretty technical to where I'm now.

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:37:32) And the F1 precision thing is not an accident. His background is normally Formula One cars. I don't know why he... What happened today is it failed.

(Alex Danobrega at 00:37:42) No. I didn't want to put it here, but I love the F1. And it's not only about cars. It's about the dedication they put into their job. Right?

(Alex Danobrega at 00:37:49) If you think about it, they dedicate their lives to it. And I think in tech... I'm not saying that it's a job. But when you're passionate about something and you put your hours into it, I think you can kind of replicate the F1 mindset where if you're going to do something, do it well rather than it's just going to work and hope for the best. So that's my mindset.

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:38:11) I'll give you a weird analogy. I don't... I'm going to get this wrong, so maybe not put it in the podcast, Joel. But it's something like this. Back in the day in the surgical profession, 40% of patients would die post surgery as they were moving them from the surgical theater to their bed or something like that.

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:38:31) And it would be... It wouldn't be immediate. It could be immediate. It could be a little while later. Right?

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:38:35) They couldn't figure out what the problem was, but the move was a nightmare. So they brought in the Formula One teams who do the, when they do their drive into the pit and they do the whatever those changeovers, they brought in that pit crew to go look at this theater and watch them move them. And it was just organized chaos. Like, guys, you guys are crossing wires, going under each other, moving this, doing that, and they improved this experience by some order of magnitude and reduced deaths in surgery by engaging these Formula One... I don't know where the idea was.

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:39:10) One of the surgeons, I said, let's bring in... Why he thought Formula One, who knows? It must have been... But it must have been like Alex and loved Formula One and thought somehow it would help. But it actually had a material reduction in the deaths after surgery. So that was really cool alignment there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:24) All right. Well, that was better than Alex's Lamborghini.

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:39:28) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hey.

(Alex Danobrega at 00:39:30) Don't believe me on that one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:32) Dude, are you kidding me, Alex? The fact that you're an F1 fan makes it even worse. Yeah. I love you. I love you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:41) But it was... Dude, I love you. You put yourself out there. By the way, brilliant. You know, I've done a thousand of these interviews, a lot with technology leaders, and I would say your path is rare, because I had you pegged as a technology person who learned how to communicate, and then I was wrong.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:00) And so you're... That means your tech skills have gotten really good because you fooled me. So good job, dude. You get it. You get the badge.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:09) Okay?

(Alex Danobrega at 00:40:10) Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:11) All right. Let's wrap up on some leadership questions since we're talking in that area anyways. I'll start with Andreas. I like to ask people for leadership advice, but I have some constraints for you. I don't want the generic or the thing you read most recently or the Instagram post you saw this morning.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:27) What I want is something someone told you or that you saw early in your career, and you're like, oh, I've got to... Maybe I should try that. Then you tried it and you stick with it. Like, it's on the top of your mind. You're like, that works.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:41) I always do that all the time. What is that thing?

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:40:45) I think I took work too seriously at the beginning. And I was just out of uni and, yeah, I was fairly fresh, and I spent a number of years in my first company, and he made it okay to... He was like, just be you or be a human being. Like, I think I've interacted with people that have a work personality, and I've always strived to just be who I am, and that will generally give rise to whatever comes. I think I was initially putting on a...

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:41:16) Thought I had to put on a character when I went to the office and be like an office person. You know? Like, out of uni, I just thought that's the way it was. I would suggest that that was a big lesson for me. I was like, oh, no.

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:41:25) I'll just be me and then, you know, come what may, in that regard. I think that's more of a personality thing. I think in terms of work execution, I had a leader who she didn't... There was no constraints on jumping into things outside of my remit, and the idea wasn't to concern yourself with who owns it, just to make sure that it is successful. And that is kind of like...

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:41:58) I've seen certain things go off the rails, or there's been a lack of ownership. And I think stepping in and either taking the ownership myself if I have to or delegating that ownership to someone where it makes sense has made a big difference rather than just... Once again, this is the whole lizard to dragon thing, address the issue as it arises. I'm very grateful for her... For the freedom to be able to just pick and choose those opportunities or challenges as I...

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:42:24) When I see them and then kind of either take them on or allocate them out. I think staying in your lane is probably, is great in certain cases, but I don't think that's what makes, makes me or anyone successful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:40) So when you started, you were taking things too seriously?

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:42:42) Yeah. I think so. I think I was at uni. I didn't know, like, I didn't know what an office person was. Like, you know, when you're, like, you're in year eight and you look at the year twelves and they seem so big, and then you get there and you feel the same.

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:42:55) Right? And then you go to year 12 and you look at adults who are working and you're like, oh, they've got all their... They've got a... They've got all their stuff together. They know what they're doing.

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:43:03) And then you get there and you kind of feel the same. So it was like, I think I had this perception that I was meant to be a certain type of person in a suit or in an office environment. And when I realized through this individual that, no, that's entirely unnecessary. Just be you. And I just...

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:43:22) It just alleviated a lot of the pressure of trying to be performing as a certain type of person as opposed to just being me and getting things done.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:30) Yeah. Figuring out who you are and what your voice is is its own journey too. Alex, what about you? What's the best piece of leadership advice you ever received and put into practice and you've kept it with you to today?

(Alex Danobrega at 00:43:41) I think one of the main ones was having more empathy for people. And what I mean empathy is about... You know how sometimes we deal with certain people and they sound angry or they don't say good morning to you and you're like, oh, I don't want to talk to that person anymore. But you don't know what they're going through. You don't know what happened over the weekend.

(Alex Donobrega at 00:44:00) So I think I learned very early on, just because someone's behaving a certain way, try and have more empathy for these people in general. So every time I deal with someone, I just try and have a more open mind and not take it offensively right away. So I think that was really... And that was actually from my first job that I had. My CEO at that time told me that.

(Alex Donobrega at 00:44:24) Just don't judge too quick. And so I think I took that on. And the other thing was, when you make a promise, you keep it. So if you say you're gonna do something, do it. So I take that very seriously because I think when you tell someone you're gonna do something just for the sake of saying it, why would you say it if you're not gonna do it?

(Alex Donobrega at 00:44:47) So I think that that was always stuck with me, and people even today do that to me. So they make a promise and they don't keep it, and it's really annoying. So I don't wanna do that feeling to other people because it's a really weird thing.

(Alex Donobrega at 00:45:01) If you say something, just do it. And I think in terms of professional level for work, using your calendar better in terms of as a reminder to do things is really important. Because I'm pretty good with memory, but using a calendar or notes changed my whole job. Because even if I say I have to do X at this time and I make a reminder of it, it will help me remember. And I'm not burning my brain cells to try, "Hey, did I forget something?" You know?

(Alex Donobrega at 00:45:29) So those ones, and it just makes life easier.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:33) Mind is weak out constantly.

(Alex Donobrega at 00:45:34) Yeah, makes life much easier. Can I ask a question to Andreas? Is that okay, Joel?

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:45:39) Yeah, yeah.

(Alex Donobrega at 00:45:41) So the question that I have is, what made you wanna be a CIO or take on that responsibility? Like, what clicked in your career that you're like, "Yep, I wanna take responsibility. I wanna make change." Like, why?

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:45:55) That's a good question. I think I don't think there's anything worth doing if there's no chance of failure, because that means you're not taking on a challenge that's big enough that you could fail. If you're doing it and there's no chance of failure, it's too easy and you should probably do something else. So for me, my career, I've gotten really good at stuff, and then when I've gotten too good at that thing, then I just can do it. I'm like, "Well, I'll go do something else." Does that make sense?

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:19) Mhmm.

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:46:19) Like, you've already climbed the mountain. It's like, well, you could climb the same mountain or you can go to another mountain. And that's kind of the way I've done things, I think. I didn't aim to be a CIO. I think I just kind of... To be honest, I started out as a pastry chef. Do you know what I mean?

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:46:38) And then I kind of went and did software engineering, and then that was the biggest U-turn, and then kind of just progressive. I wasn't intent. It was more... My career progression has been very much this: I see Alex in my company doing something. That role looks interesting. I'm gonna try that. And then I'm in that role for a while. I'm like, I see this guy doing something different. Oh, that looks interesting. I'm gonna do that. And then it kinda... And then it just took on different challenges until I did them to the degree that I was successful, and I just kept taking on bigger things. So it'd be interesting to see what comes next. You know?

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:47:11) But yeah, it wasn't my aim to be a CIO. I could have been a pastry chef. Could have stayed at BA. There's a range of different pathways that I could have done. I just think—

(Alex Donobrega at 00:47:22) So maybe how important is storage for you, Andreas? Maybe is that the question? Rather than talk about HPE, because it's storage and then we talk about the product. I don't know.

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:47:31) Storage to me needs to be scalable to the degree that we can ensure that there's enough storage there to be able to leverage when we need it, but not to be billed at the full storage capacity. So sort of like providing on-prem infrastructure that represents cloud billing models is a big part of the reason to go with GreenLake. And when it comes to... Right now, GreenLake is storing data across a range of auditable systems that we have. Some of those are regulatory-driven requirements. So we have to store that data, and we have to do those audits. At the moment, the storage is there, and once the data strategy comes to—is endorsed—it's gonna be how do we leverage the other components of GreenLake to consume, interpret, and surface that data through not just analytical purposes, but also through AI. Because a lot of the research that we do...

(Andreas Diamanti at 00:48:32) We also have a research body. So we have a body called ANZASM, I believe its name is, at ASINIPS. A lot of that is research. We provide government insight into surgical professional standards, into what we're seeing across the surgical industry and stuff, or they'll commission a study into something very specific. And a lot of that is data-driven. A lot of that is from systems that are currently housed in GreenLake, but the way that we get access to that data is not, by any means, efficient. So I think having the data strategy endorsed and then understanding how GreenLake can support that strategy by surfacing the information is gonna be very, very helpful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:11) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.