Sidecar Sync

Transforming Healthcare Nonprofits: Inteleos' Tech Evolution and AI Future with Dale Cyr & Juan Sanchez | 36

• Amith Nagarajan and Mallory Mejias • Episode 36

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In this episode of Sidecar Sync, Mallory and Amith sit down with Dale Cyr, CEO, and Juan Sanchez, CIO of Inteleos, a leading nonprofit in the healthcare certification space. They delve into the transformative role of AI in healthcare and how Inteleos is leveraging technology to drive organizational growth and efficiency. Discover how Inteleos has navigated challenges, embraced a culture of continuous learning, and strategically reduced technical debt to stay ahead in the rapidly evolving landscape. Tune in for insights on balancing innovation with operational stability and the importance of being futurist thinkers in today’s dynamic environment.

📣 Follow Dale Cyr on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dalecyr/

📣 Follow Juan Sanchez on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/juansprofile/

🔎 Learn more about Inteleos by visiting:
https://inteleosfoundation.org/

Chapters:

0:00 Interview With Inteleos CEO and CIO 
9:19 C-Suite Learning and Collaboration 
15:00 Navigating IT Growth and Evolution 
25:45 Strategic Priorities in Tech Debt Reduction 
32:44 Future of AI in Healthcare Professions 
38:59 Expanding AI in Healthcare Profession 
44:08  Investing in Future AI Strategies 
48:00 Organizational Culture and AI Education 

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More about Your Hosts:

Amith Nagarajan is the Chairman of Blue Cypress 🔗 https://BlueCypress.io, a family of purpose-driven companies and proud practitioners of Conscious Capitalism. The Blue Cypress companies focus on helping associations, non-profits, and other purpose-driven organizations achieve long-term success. Amith is also an active early-stage investor in B2B SaaS companies. He’s had the good fortune of nearly three decades of success as an entrepreneur and enjoys helping others in their journey.

📣 Follow Amith on LinkedIn:
https://linkedin.com/amithnagarajan

Mallory Mejias is the Manager at Sidecar, and she's passionate about creating opportunities for association professionals to learn, grow, and better serve their members using artificial intelligence. She enjoys blending creativity and innovation to produce fresh, meaningful content for the association space.

📣 Follow Mallory on Linkedin:
https://linkedin.com/mallorymejias

Juan:

We have eliminated the word projects from our company, which is, to me, everything right. It's like what is the problem to solve? What's the product we need to build to solve it? That's how we start to think.

Amith:

Welcome to Sidecar Sync, your weekly dose of innovation. If you're looking for the latest news, insights and developments in the association world, especially those driven by artificial intelligence, you're in the right place. We cut through the noise to bring you the most relevant updates, with a keen focus on how AI and other emerging technologies are shaping the future. No fluff, just facts and informed discussions. I'm Amit Nagarajan, chairman of Blue Cypress, and I'm your host.

Mallory:

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Sidecar Sync. My name is Mallory Mejiaz, I am one of your co-hosts, along with Amit Nagarajan, and I also run Sidecar. Today, we have an exciting interview lined up for you with both the CEO and the CIO of Intellios. Intellios is a global nonprofit community of more than 140,000 medical professionals united in assuring that patients obtain the highest quality healthcare. Today, you'll be able to hear firsthand from Dale Sear and Juan Sanchez about how they've been able to achieve significant growth at Intellios. In about five years, they went from spending 30 to 40% of the time thinking about offense and new technology and innovation to now the inverse of that 60 to 70 percent of time spent on the new stuff, as swan calls it. Stay tuned for some strategies and tactics for growth, like tackling technical debt, prioritizing a culture of learning and embracing the role of futurist. Before we dive into that interview, here is a quick word from our sponsor. Today's sponsor is Sidecar's AI Learning Hub. The Learning Hub is your go-to place to sharpen your AI skills, ensuring you're keeping up with the latest in the AI space. With the AI Learning Hub, you'll get access to a library of lessons designed to the unique challenges and opportunities within associations, weekly live office hours with AI experts and a community of fellow AI enthusiasts who are just as excited about learning AI as you are. Are you ready to future-proof your career? You can purchase 12-month access to the AI Learning Hub for $399. For more information, go to sidecarglobalcom slash hub.

Mallory:

Before we kick off today's episode, I want to give you a little bit more information about who Dale and Juan are. Dale Sear is the Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director for Intellios, the non-profit umbrella governance and management organization for the American Registry for Diagnostic Medical Sonography, the Alliance for Physician Certification and Advancement, the Point of Care Ultrasound Certification Academy and the Intellios Foundation. Throughout Dale's 25 years of CEO experience, he has given numerous lectures, keynotes and workshops in areas of business and certification throughout the world and continues to guide Intellios' mission growth, employing the interaction field methodology and network leadership to develop shared value models to build communities and ecosystems and global health. As the chief information officer at Intellios, juan Sanchez brings 25 years of technology experience, with over a decade spent honing his skills in leadership and strategic IT management. His mission is clear to drive organizational growth through product thinking that delivers innovative solutions. But for Juan, it's not just about the technology. It's about the people behind it. Okrs, agile systems thinking and adaptive organizational designs are not just methodologies to Juan. They are the foundation of his leadership philosophy. He has witnessed firsthand how these approaches can transform organizations, unleash the power of teams and drive meaningful results. It's about embracing change, being adaptable and always striving for improvement.

Mallory:

This is a fantastic episode we have lined up, and I am not just saying that, so stay tuned as we kick it off. Dale and Juan, thank you both so much for joining us today. We have never interviewed two people before on the Sidecar Sync podcast, and thus we've never interviewed a CEO and CIO pair. We're really excited to dive into how you work together, how you collaborate on strategy, the things that work for your relationship and maybe the things that don't work or haven't worked in the past. So, first and foremost, can you both share a little bit about you and your background and your role? Dale, we'll start with you.

Dale:

Oh well, great. Thank you, mallory and Amit, thanks for having us on this podcast. Well, my career started way back. I've had a couple of careers One I actually was in clinical medicine and I was a sonographer practicing at the University of Washington.

Dale:

And after a bit of that I decided to go to a business school and went and got my MBA at the Elbert School of Business and Economics in Seattle, and that was at a great time of tech, of the tech boom and entrepreneurship which that business school embraced, and so it got me very comfortable with tech and tech business models and, you know, at that time, the future. From there I went into a boutique private equity firm and dealt with tech and read thousands of business plans and most of them not very good, but they still got funded. And then the tech implosion occurred and fortunately Intellios, or what used to be known as the ARDMS at that time, contacted me and one thing led to another and I've been fortunate enough to lead the organization for about 25 years. And so here I am and still having a lot of fun. Thank you for that and Juan, yeah.

Mallory:

Hey guys. Thank you for that, and Juan.

Juan:

Yeah, hey guys, thank you as well for having us on here. So my background a little bit. I started building computers when I was 12. I ran Bolton board systems when I was probably around that same age using phone lines and got really mad when my parents would pick up the line and disconnect me. So I loved computers for basically most of my life, and although I didn't study any of that in college, because when I got to college the internet wasn't quite a thing yet. But while I was in college my brother said hey, do you want to learn how to make webpages? And I said sure, what's that? And he said well, read a couple of books. And I said great, I'll read some books. And then I learned how to make web pages.

Juan:

Well, by the time I graduated which I got my degree in business and logistics nothing to do with computers I went to work at a big global company as a logistics person and the first thing that I realized when I got there was logistics doesn't work really well unless you also have computer systems backing it. When I got there was logistics doesn't work really well unless you also have computer systems backing it, because some of the processes that I saw were people walking order cards by hand in cursive writing between each other. I said that's adorable, but we're going to need a system for this, and so my love for systems thinking sort of started evolving even then. And I lasted in that job a year and a half and I said you know what I need to make my career in tech. So I quit much to the chagrin of my dad because I totally boomeranged back to their house for a year and then I started looking for work and I actually got two job offers from two different associations in DC.

Juan:

Those of you that are in the DC area know we are chock full of these nonprofits here. I had no clue what an association was, but I have actually now made my career and I've been in this world of nonprofits for all of my career essentially. And five years ago I joined the Intellio's team. It was my first shot at the quote unquote at the table kind of executive role in technology, which we'll talk about. That, which I think was really innovative and very cool that this company has that seat and it's been. It's actually really it's been an amazing time for five years at this company, so looking forward to talking about that.

Mallory:

Awesome, thank you. Can one of you share a little bit more about what Intellios does with our listeners?

Dale:

Well, intellios, we are a nonprofit, and particularly a 501c6. And, at the core, we're a certification organization. We certify healthcare professionals, mainly in medical imaging, and about 80% of our business is in the field of ultrasound, and so we do primary certifications across three councils that deal with both physician, non-physician, nursing all types of healthcare professionals across all clinical specialties. We have just over 140,000 active certificates with us and we are in about a hundred countries Now. Granted, many of those countries have very small numbers at this point, but we're rapidly expanding and scaling globally and our whole purpose is to make sure that people know what they're doing within patient care, and we want to improve global health and we feel one of the best pathways to get there is through appropriate areas of certification.

Mallory:

Can you talk a little bit about your working relationship that dynamic, and how do you both balance the responsibilities between being a CEO and then being a CIO?

Juan:

So I mean, look, it's been five years, right. So, like any good relationship, it takes a little time to kind of develop and figure itself out. I can tell you that for me, you know, dale and I talked about, you know, this podcast earlier, right, because we wanted to like sync up on what we believed about this, this story, and you know, one of the things that we kind of landed on was this idea of, like, um, intellectual honesty and intellectual curiosity. And I've told the story a few times before, but when I, before the pandemic, we still had an office. We have been remote since the pandemic.

Juan:

So in that context, when I first walked into my, my office, dale had left me three books on my desk and a handwritten note, which, pro tip, handwritten notes are a thing I still have it we actually talked about this the other day and in those, in that set of books, there were great books. You know, we can talk about those later, but it was the fundamentals of like here you're going to learn and that, I think, for me personally, set off a path that was very different than sort of where I had been before, which, you know, you kind of learn on your own, but it never been in this very curated approach of like we're going to learn this and this connects to this, and this and this connects to that, and that's been true across our entire executive team for the last five years.

Amith:

There's always the bulk of the year or versions of that, um, so that for me has kind of set the stage, uh, for how we relate to each other dale, you and I have, uh, known each other we were saying before we started recording for most of the time you've been at Intellios previously ARDMS and we crossed paths at first in the early 00s, and the question I have for you related to what Juan just shared is has that always been the culture at Intellios? Have you always had that kind of a learning organization where you provide books as part of onboarding?

Dale:

Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, my general philosophy is that a successful organization has to be a learning organization, and the type of learning and the content of learning certainly has evolved. And the math. You've been in tech for all these years and we all completely understand how much it has changed and the recent accelerations of this.

Dale:

So, moving from a basic learning organization and this is not from my perspective, it's not only for staff but it's also for my board and so I have to bring both groups along to kind of meet on the strategic levels of these areas and really the only way to do that is through learning, and people learn differently. Some read some video, some experiential only. But you have to encompass that. And the only way you can keep up with the time, so to speak, and especially in an exponential era that we're in, is to really kind of stay ahead of the curve and embrace and uh and cajole and uh, have people learning and that type of dna, of that type of personality that's essential, especially in the c-suite. And so when we interview for c-suite so that's where we had it with one that is almost number one uh, for me is that are they a learner, are they willing to learn and embrace new concepts and things of that area and if that occurs, that's a good start.

Amith:

Yeah, it's one of my favorite interview questions with any person would be like what's the favorite recent book that you've read, whether it's fiction or fiction, is to kind of share a little bit about the person's learning journey. That's awesome. At my former company we used to send out for every new hire. There was a set of I don't remember how many books, it was three or four books. Very similar approach did a lot of handwritten notes of recognition.

Dale:

Tell us a little bit about the relationship, specifically in terms of the reporting relationship and the CIO role, I believe Dale Juan reports directly to you in the structure that you guys have Not quite, the structure we have is that Juan reports directly to the chief operating officer, got it. But it's such a team environment within the C-suite that having direct access to me and me to Juan and all the other chiefs is, I mean, essentially they do. The real issue is that who actually performs the performance reviews? That's what direct reports mean, essentially they do. The real issue is that who actually performs the performance reviews? That's what direct reports mean. Right, but around that, yeah, I mean it's all an open team and for communication.

Amith:

Yeah, a lot of people might say there's a dotted line relationship between you guys because you're very closely interwoven in terms of how you think about strategy and how you work together. I think that's a significant departure from the historical location, if you will, of IT within associations, where it was first of all not typically a C-level position but also it was often tucked away kind of under finance administration most commonly. Tell us about kind of the evolution of the role within your organization leading up to Ironclad.

Dale:

Yeah Well, as a real small organization, when we first started out, it and finance were kind of rolled into one, but it did not take long to separate that out, and if you're going to be a head of a division, you are at the table. That's just the way it has to be, whether it be IT or HR or whatever. So this is the C-suite teamwork and the executive leadership teamwork that we all inspired to do. As you just said, though, the CIO role has changed dramatically over the last decade and, by definition, knowing that technology is the infrastructure of the organization and our growth, as well as many other organizations, how could the CIO not be at the table to help me and the other chiefs with strategy? For those who don't do it, it's more a question to me than normal.

Amith:

That's a really helpful observation. One quick question for you, dale, and I want to ask Juan a related question on that trajectory. But I know when we first crossed paths, you guys were relatively small in terms of staff revenue et cetera. It sounds like you've grown in time. Can you give us some quick, high-level stats on where you were and where you are now in terms of employees or annual budget or anything like that?

Dale:

Yeah, I was employee number 12. Okay, and at the time we had about 22,000, uh certificates. So, projecting to today, in our growth, uh, uh, our revenue is just under 25 million. Uh, when I started it was about three or four. Uh, we have about, between all, all human resources, we have about 120 staff and um, uh, and, as I said, we have about 140,000 and much more global than than than we can hold.

Amith:

And the reason I want to ask you that is for our listeners to understand you guys have gone through some remarkable growth and success. It's not common for associations to experience that kind of growth, particularly in, honestly, a very short period of time In our lifetimes. Obviously it's a half a career or two thirds of a career for a lot of people, but it's also pretty quick relative to the space space. And I think that from my point of view, just looking at you guys, well, since a lot of other peer organizations that started off in that kind of low to mid single digit millions at that time period, that learning mentality and that cultural mentality you described, I have to think, is a big part of that success story being able to think differently and take advantage of opportunities that have arisen as a result of that 100% and the key is to kind of stay ahead of the game and see what's coming down the road, especially as technology plays such an important role in our culture and our strategy.

Dale:

And kind of trying to keep up with the times and to adopt the technologies to enhance our business and our mission is key, and the evolutions of the psychology of the organization, both at the board and at the staff levels, with the CIO being a direct partner on this, has been largely the success of where we are today.

Amith:

Well, that leads me to the question I had before, juan, and it's regarding offense versus defense. When you think about your role and how much time you spend kind of on each side of the ball, if you will. I think that's one of the big shifts that's happened in the last couple of decades broadly in the nonprofit sector is that people historically thought of IT as the people who kept the blinking lights blinking in the server room back when such things existed, and it was cybersecurity, which of course remains ultra important, but it was all about like, not breaking things. Cybersecurity, which of course remains ultra important, but it was all about like not breaking things. That was kind of the mindset and posture, as opposed to the forward deployed you know folks who were doing special forces things right. So it's like, how do you think about offense versus defense in your role and how does that align with Dale or not align with Dale in terms of his desire for, you know, percentage of time, let's say percentage of resources, on offense versus defense?

Juan:

Yeah. So I think you're obviously totally on the money with how IT's role has evolved, because it's funny, one of the things that I told the team when I first sort of arrived was that if we do nothing else, we're going to stop being a black box to this business. Right, classical stuff, which was people thinking that a list of things to do, to get done would be put into this IT group and something would come out the other end and that was the end of the interaction. It was very transactional, so that was sort of breaking that down in terms of office and offense and defense.

Juan:

I've heard this sort of metaphor before and I mean I understand where it comes from, so, fair enough, I kind of look at it a little bit differently. I kind of look at it more kind of like a mix between a layer cake and a blueprint kind of thing, whereas where are the room? I'll use the blueprint metaphor, like when you're designing a house, right, there are spaces that have purpose, and so we kind of think, I think about that that way which is here is a room in which we're going to, we're going to design, uh, intent, intentfully, but intentionally, so that it handles this part of the business. There's another part of the of the house that's got a different kind of room that is for a different purpose, right. So we kind of look at it that way and I've tried to work on evolving even the structure of this division so that it kind of speaks a little bit to that, knowing full well that one of the things we talk about is, if it's not all of us, it's none of us, right? So that also kind of getting rid of the I'm in this department or I'm in that department and this is my function and this is the other function.

Juan:

It's an entirely integrated system, going back to the sort of systems thinking thing I mentioned before, I think based on the kind of stuff that we get to learn together as an exec team and, to Dale's point, our reporting structure. So to those that know me know that I don't care for titles and I don't care for hierarchies and I don't care for organizational charts. But there are these artifacts that we still have to live with, right, I call them the cave paintings. So, yeah, all right, fine, the lines say that this person gives us this performance review, which, you know, another sort of cave painting thing. But really honestly, as a group, we work together.

Juan:

So, with all that stuff in mind, the the offense and let's let's call offense the new stuff, right, the interesting stuff, quote unquote um, I think over the last five years that has shifted from a 30, 30 to 40 percent amount of the thinking we do to the inversion um, where now we we are thinking about product, we're thinking about how do we, how can we deliver not only product within the organization but product to our customers directly there, to any, and then to customers that we haven't even identified as a core customer? Um, because of the innovation sort of the incubation that we've been able to do internally is like new things emerge and then we're like, well, we can take opportunity. We tend to add opportunity and scale it to doing something else. So it's, it has flipped around.

Juan:

Yeah, but you're right, I mean like the defense part of it, absolutely Cybersecurity. Uh, we've we've worked a lot in that space, um keeping systems together. I talk a lot about technical debt and org debt as well. So to me that's defense, right, because you're sort of tending to the landscaping around our metaphorical house. So, yeah, I think that's kind of been the evolution for five years.

Amith:

Well, that's super helpful, and the inversion you describe, I think, is where organizations need to be going. Certainly, what I call defense and more of the maintenance side of the house is not something you should abandon. It's critically important, otherwise you're going to have a giant fire in that house. At the same time, it needs to be thinking, especially in the world we live in today, in the 24,. You've got to look broadly at what's happening at the macro level, what's happening to your profession, what's happening to your association, both because of that and what you should be doing to move the profession forward. There's so many things to have to focus on, more so than ever before.

Amith:

People who are talking about AI specifically often say to me well, this is kind of like when the internet first came upon us and I said, yeah, in a way it's a radically disruptive, transformative technology, but it's way bigger than the internet because it builds on the internet, it uses the internet as input. So where you guys are at, I think, is an enviable position for most association folks listening to this, because I would guess that most people, if they were intellectually honest with themselves, are probably still on the other side of that inversion, where they're spending most of their time on the like maintenance and technical debt kind of stuff. I don't know. Would you agree? Would you guys agree with that, or do you think that people are further along?

Juan:

Yeah, I, you know, I think I think in general I unfortunately, you're probably right, I don't. I would say I tend to be uh, uh, on this side of the world I tend to be an optimist and the point of view that it's not because people are actively trying to sabotage the evolution, right. But but to the point is, uh, is the ability to get to that, is, the willingness of the company to listen. So I guess two things really is one that me as a technology person, have a voice that people will listen to and that's built over years of trust and working together. And so once that sort of takes hold, then people like the organization will start realizing like boy, we can't really keep doing the same thing. Like boy, we can't really keep doing the same thing. Dale can't be the guy or gal that's in the seat like this that says IT's job is to replace my keyboard and make sure that I've got a computer every six months. So that mindset has to happen.

Juan:

Great, so that you unlock that Now you're able to do other things. And I mean I double click on so hard the idea of technical debt. And then, like I said, it related to the organizational debt component of this, because that's the kind of stuff that keeps you in defense, right, it's. It's literally if I cannot pay down. I use the credit card metaphor. There's a bunch of reasons you can or ways you can explain this, but if I only pay my minimum debt on my credit card, I'm going to get buried with interest, right. I will never pay down what I actually owe on that card. It's the same thing in this world, right? And so until you can start being honest about that and attack that aggressively and the executive team is behind you and the board is behind you doing that as well you're not going to get to that inversion.

Amith:

Well. So, on that note and using a personal finance metaphor as a way to continue the conversation and switch back to Dale, so clearly you have to make some tough choices. So if you're going to pay down your credit card debt, you have to lower your spend. You have to make choices in your life that allow you to put away bigger chunks of dollars towards paying down the principal of the credit card right. So in a sense, if you throw that comparison back to the association land, you have to stop doing certain things. There's a limited amount of resources all of us have in terms of dollars and time and there's always so many things you can do.

Amith:

Yet associations tend to be really good at perpetuating pretty much everything. It's kind of a basket of projects by committee and it's very hard to kill things off once they start, and the board oftentimes is part of that. Right, there's a lot of uh churn on boards. That's partly by design and partly just based on the politics of it. But um, what I'm curious about is you guys clearly have created room in your budget, both financially and, you know, in terms of energy, to stop doing things. I'm anticipating you'll say that there have been things you've made difficult choices, to say no, to Talk to us about that, particularly in the governance side, how you can maybe push back in certain areas where you say no. We have to stop doing this and think ahead two years or whatever the case may be. Are there some examples? First of all, does that align with what's happened with you guys? Secondly, maybe there's some examples you could share.

Dale:

Yeah, that's exactly what occurs. And again I'll go back to knowing what we need to do, and I couldn't agree more with Juan. Tech debt is probably the biggest barrier to strategic growth for organizations and once you recognize that that has to be the priority and it's really up to the CEO and the C-suite team to educate the board on priorities is that we have to prioritize investment to move away from tech debt and it's really about opportunity costs. You know what opportunity costs will occur, will not occur if we don't fix this. Otherwise, we're going to continue to have your head of IT, whatever title they have, continue to be a server jockey and that does not allow the organization to expand and grow into amazing new technologies that can help the organization's efficiency, effectiveness, mission growth and profitability. That drives the mission growth in nonprofits.

Dale:

So that has to be articulated and that can only occur through careful planning and meetings and having a CIO that can speak lay terms to this and then having the CFO, the CIO, the CEO, the COO being able to articulate the same messaging to the board and to the rest of the organization, where each of those specialties contribute to demonstrating the opportunity costs of this strategic priority of reducing tech debt and actually once you start that, the tangible results of that are quite quick. It doesn't take years, it takes a couple quarters. Once something is implemented and you can have tangible demonstrations to the organization board and staff. This is working. And oh, by the way, look for some people, wow, you have some more time. So those are key, strategic what I consider action plans to move along, to decrease tech debt and to strategically prioritize investment.

Amith:

That's super helpful. To drill in that a little bit, maybe each of you can give us a quick rapid fire on your favorite thing you've killed over the last five years in terms of tech debt reduction.

Dale:

Oh my gosh For me.

Amith:

internal servers Internal servers Got it, so moving to the cloud.

Dale:

Migration strategic plans in the cloud. And at the time Juan came on, people were still nervous about the cloud for security and it took time to make people understand that it's actually more secure and and so, as we've reduced all the internal servers and oh wow, we don't have to pay for air conditioning anymore and we don't have to pay for whatever and and three staff that only was tweaking servers all day long, and those types of things are tangible and to me, that was probably the most effective opportunity cost plan that we did.

Juan:

I got. All right, I'll give you. I'll give you four really funny and quick ones. The first one was I remember getting here and look in this, what I'm about to tell you has nothing to do with the people that were here at the time. It's just what it was. So be it, let it. Let it be that I got here, one of our main database servers kept crashing and I was like man, what's going on? And so I just asked. I came from a database background. I said let me just take a quick peek. It's kind of weird for the CIO to do that. Okay, take a quick peek. Well, we were running a production server with 16 gigs of RAM and I told the team. I said so, guys, we're running a real company, let's go ahead and put some real RAM into this box. Right and it. So we fixed that.

Juan:

There's tech debt. One Right Second version of tech debt was I got here and we were still having a conversation because of what Dale mentioned. This organization used to be called the ARDMS and then they've added other governance layers to it and through that time this is a little bit of tech and org debt. All these different. Everybody wanted a new brand to go with an email address, brand to go with an email address. So we were in the IT group. We had inherited the need to manage at least three different email domains for every single employee here, and we were like, yep, we're going to stop doing that too. So we said everybody just gets an Intellios address. And we did that.

Juan:

So that was TechDev 2. Techdev 3, simple but very effective one, and I would have never predicted this unless the pandemic sort of really made this happen. We said from day one we're going to make everything single sign-on across all our SaaS platforms. So we're just going to invest in that. We go and pay for SaaS platforms that offer single sign-on. We always try to pay for that or negotiate it in.

Juan:

Suddenly the pandemic showed up Everybody's remote at the house, the whole thing. And guess what? We don't have to be chasing around 15 different passwords for every customer or every employee, sorry to figure out how to log into a platform. They use one account. It makes onboarding much easier, it makes offboarding much easier. And then finally, one which isn't like a traditional tech debt. But I still sort of included in this kind of idea how the team works, because when I got here, a team was telling me that they were using Scrum to do their work and they had 144 tickets in a backlog and I said that's not any of that. None of that is working right, so let's work on that. And so we did a lot of effort on re-engineering, essentially, and then learning how to trust each other again on how to work, and to me, that's tech debt as well.

Amith:

Well, I appreciate that Between the two of you guys, that's five really concrete examples for our listeners, and those are things anyone can do. There's a lot of associations that still have physical infrastructure either on their own premises or they use an old school cloud provider, which is not really cloud. It's more of infrastructure managed by a small team. They're not using Azure or AWS or Google and really there's no reason for that.

Amith:

You don't run your own power plant behind your building and you shouldn't run your IT stuff, your fundamental infrastructure, that way anymore. But people are still doing it, and the other examples you provided are also excellent. You know a lot of the people I talk to say hey, amit, I'm really interested in taking advantage of AI. I want to really go after these opportunities, but we're so busy we just can't possibly take on quote unquote another thing, and so, of course, ai is not another thing. It's probably the thing for a lot of people. Anyway it will be in the coming years.

Amith:

What you guys are describing clears the way for being able to spend more time on offense or on new initiatives, so I think it's a really important point for folks to really underscore and shifting gears a little bit. One question I wanted to ask you guys is do you see it as part of your role internal to Intellios to be part of the futurist thinking of where your profession is going with artificial intelligence, specifically with technology more broadly? I think a lot about medical imaging and the impact AI has already had in assisting people in the space professionally. I know there's been a lot of studies about radiographers, with and without AI.

Amith:

Is it a replacement for people in the profession? Is it an augmentation or a co-pilot strategy? I have to imagine that's affecting your space significantly and will be in the coming 5-10 years. Is that part of what you guys and will be in the coming five, 10 years? Is that part of what you guys work on internal to the association? Or maybe that's different for each of your roles? I'd love to hear a little bit about that.

Dale:

Yeah, so uh, and Talios is in a somewhat unique situation because we have two communities that we, that we deal with. One is actually in healthcare and the healthcare professional that we certify and the other is the testing community, which actually are. This, which is where our business is based of, of the actual models and methodologies of assuring that people are proficient in what they do Two separate buckets, and AI is addressing both of those differently, but to some degree the same. We don't directly impact, have an impact right now on the day-to-day of our healthcare professionals, but we know what's coming down the road and we prefer to look at people and talk about AI as, especially internally with staff and our healthcare professionals, not to be scared of it, but just look at it as a cognitive partner.

Dale:

And you know I was talking to a radiologist not too long ago and basically I said how many normal chest x-rays do you want to read, you know, versus?

Dale:

Can AI kind of take that? And you can move on to much more complex situations and for the foreseeable future, I see that, as far as our business goes within Intellios, the ability in the short and midterm to dramatically improve efficiencies and effectiveness across all systems within the organization is real, and that doesn't mean we're necessarily eliminating jobs, but we can probably grow without a one-to-one ratio of growth to an individual, and so the cognitive partner seems to be a good psychological area. Internally, culturally, we have programs going on as we speak to train up, skill up and upskill people on AI and the use of AI. There's a full spectrum. People are embracing it, there's people who are freaked out by it, but we have to deal first. I'm an AI first believer wholeheartedly, but I'm also a human first believer as well, and so we need to move the people and the human areas into this to capture the full potential of our AI-first initiatives throughout the organization.

Juan:

Juan, what are your thoughts? Yeah, it's funny that you even used the word futurist, because when Dale and I spoke earlier in the week, I asked him the question. I said you know, what would you leave people with after we were done recording this? Right, a piece of advice. And he says you have to be a futurist. And so to the point, right, like that's what we I think all of us collectively in our team try to think that way, I personally, for me, I try to look at technology convergence. Right, so sure, ai is here, but AI isn't on its own right. Like, where else is AI going to play a factor here? To Dale's point of like, trying to upskill, people try to diminish internal fear about a tool.

Juan:

Within a day of both either OpenAI or we're also a really big fan of another platform called Perplexity, ai. Within a day of both of those platforms, essentially announcing they were offering Teams or enterprise-style accounts. We opened accounts right, we already had a couple of individual people with accounts there, but I'll go back to paying down the tech debt single sign-on. They both have it right, they offer it. So we were able to implement that immediately and start onboarding people onto these platforms so that they can get comfortable as a community. We also have internal chat channels and all sorts of things about AI. As a community, get comfortable with using these tools and sharing wins and tips and et cetera.

Juan:

And now I think in this last quarter that we're in, that we're just wrapping up now a new group has formed that are AI coaches business that are out there working together with other people in the organization to try to get them up to speed on what this is all about. So, yeah, so I mean, the futurism thing is real and you know not to not to like overemphasize on it or over index on it, but the reason that, personally, I get a chance to think about stuff like that is because I'm not tied up with trying to figure out why our servers are going down or whatever or why people can't log into something. That's the stuff that lets you actually then take advantage of in your brain and the cycles during the day.

Amith:

Yeah, those are both super helpful and interesting viewpoints. One thing I would look at is what's the arc of the profession or the industry. Where is it going? Whether it's law or accounting or architecture or a particular discipline within healthcare, what's going to happen to that field in the coming five, seven, 10 years? Obviously very difficult to project that, but we have certain trend lines that we can look at. There is convergence amongst multiple exponential curves, obviously AI being one of them.

Amith:

What's happening in material science is another interesting one, probably in your field. When you think about what's happening in the clinical environment and you think about that and say, well, what's going to happen to your clinical professionals if handheld diagnostic caliber tools are available in the field that can do what might have been only available with the highest end fixed equipment a few years ago? Right, you know, since you have that it opens up an incredible opportunity for greater equity in healthcare globally and all these wonderful things. But what does it mean for professionals if, let's just say, hypothetically, an iPhone could do a sonogram at some point? Right, you know, we're probably only years away from glucometers being built into every wrist wearable type thing, which is an incredible thing. But what about imaging right. So how does that affect your field? You guys think about that kind of uh you know change, and how do you prepare your profession for those kinds of changes?

Juan:

Yeah, yeah, let me take the one on the on the first side. I want you to talk about the professional part of it, cause you they're near and dear to that, obviously. Uh, look, amit, spoiler alert what you just described basically exists already, right? So, point of care, ultrasound is a real thing. $3,000 device, usb into your phone, you've got an imaging device. So, like, I'll take it from the tech side and go back to the convergence theme right, great, you're going to put a very powerful diagnostic piece of equipment in the hands of anybody.

Juan:

Essentially, eventually, two opportunities show up One risk, one opportunity, opportunity, one which is everywhere in the world. Now this could be a reality for diagnostics. So that gives us a global play, right? The second part of this is anybody could pick up this device and do something which goes straight against our mission of not hurting people, right? Like then, we want public safety to be a thing with patients, and so we think about what other technologies and what partnerships can we strive for so that that device is safer to use, both from the point of view of the person handling the device being well-educated and competent, et cetera, but also what technology tools can we use on device to make it, for example, harder for just anybody to fire it up by launching an app, and instead, maybe what if they had a digital credential that paired with the app, so that you couldn't open it until you were actually validated that you actually knew what you were doing, right? So that's on the tech side and you know, dale, you can talk about the people side really more.

Dale:

Yeah, well, as Juan said, the technology outlined in MEATH is really already here and, from an ultrasound perspective, these small devices are here. The cost barriers are lower, so low to middle-income countries around the world now have access. We largely believe that small ultrasound devices will replace the stethoscope over the next decade, which means millions of people will have access to this, and from our perspective, that's the good news. The bad news is that millions of people are going to have access to a diagnostic tool that's about 100 times more powerful than a stethoscope. So we feel the obligation that we need to be able to meet these people at the practice, at the local practice level, make sure that they know what they're doing. That level of scalability can only occur through technology, and AI is going to play a very large role in that.

Dale:

At the basic level, at the existing advanced economy level, with the existing professionals, yeah, ai will supplement their work, there's no doubt about that, but that will allow these professionals to do away with their clinical debt, if you want to use that term, so they can perform higher cognitive skills and levels of care. That's not going to get any better, and so, but yet the demand for healthcare as economies become more advanced and things of that nature. That demand is increasing, so how are you going to fill that gap? And so I look at AI as playing a large role of filling the gap versus replacing. And that's where we're at Now on the tech side, on our business side the ability to change the models of testing, which clearly are not sustainable. The existing models of testing just really don't work well, and so our evolution of our business and our modeling with an AI infrastructure to move into adaptive learning and testing at the same time, and things of that nature that can only occur through basic technologies such as AI.

Amith:

Well, I think you guys are so well positioned to benefit from that as an organization and deliver value to a much broader community over time. It's the possible expansion of those concentric circles as to what may be like a full-time, dedicated center of the orbit type professional who is a sonographer, but then people who are further and further from that core that will be dealing with sonography through the lowering of costs that you described physicians of all stripes, nurses, medical assistants, physician's assistants, personal, you know, physical therapists all these people would use this tool in a way that you're describing to dramatically improve outcomes, which is super exciting, and it also creates a need for both training in various forms, whether it's true certification or even some kind of micro-credentialing that you guys could offer. I'm sure you guys would think about all that stuff and that's the kind of expansion of the pie that I'd like all association leaders to be thinking about. And when you think about, for example, legal services, association leaders who are, say, running a state or local bar association might say, well, the problem is that lawyers are being displaced by AI assistants that can write contracts or even do litigation, and that's kind of the fixed pie mindset. But there's lots of people out there who don't have access to legal services, small companies, individuals who can now gain access to legal services to improve their quality of life, or whatever the case may be, in a very similar vein to what you described.

Amith:

So I think the mindset has to be around the overall high expanding, and that's where AI I think holds so much promise, along with other exponential tech, like when you're dealing with the world of atoms rather than bits, as you guys are in the clinical environment. There's a lot of interesting exponentials happening there too. I want to ask you one more question. I know Mallory has a couple that she wants to provide you, but the question I have is I know you guys recently invested both dollars and, more importantly, time to travel together. I think. Was it to Harvard where you guys took a course? Was it maybe a week-long course on AI? And tell us about that experience?

Dale:

in terms of really why you did it and what you learned and what you'd suggest other people consider as a CEO-CIO pair, thinking about something like that. Yeah, I can start with this one. Actually, we took that last fall it was competing in the Age of AI out of Harvard Business School, but it was actually a virtual thing. So it was I don't know six or seven weeks and there were about 200 people around the world attending this, which was great from a network perspective and we still have great friends that we built from that.

Dale:

I wanted to take it simply because of the business modeling. I wanted to learn more of the cutting edge of the business modeling around AI and I didn't want to get into a deep coding and things of that. That's irrelevant. So it was around the business modeling and I said, well, I need Juan there with me. Juan needs to take this with me because he has to understand the business modeling from a strategic perspective so we can move the organization forward into these areas, and so, from my perspective, it was an excellent course. I know Juan got a lot out of it. I got a lot out of it and consequently, it has shaped our AI strategy, moving forward from a business operations and strategic perspective, keith.

Amith:

what you said there from my point of view is, as the CEO of a substantial organization, you personally took the time over a series of six, seven weeks to get your own education on this. So maybe you weren't going down to the raw metal and the bits and bytes, but you were really deeply understanding AI so that you could inform your thinking on the future of the business, and that's an investment. You had to make, both dollars and a lot of your time. It's an opportunity cost.

Juan:

It's an opportunity cost, yeah, so as an example of the topic of the podcast in general, so that's evidence of how Dale and I kind of sync up and we're actually even still to this day looking at coursework online for opportunities of stuff that might come up. That's interesting and also kind of game plan on if something shows up that maybe doesn't fit exactly either one of our camps, like who on our team could fit there, right. So we sort of make make a whole picture out of that. The other part was sort of something simple and maybe dumb in a way, but Dale and I set up like I think was like an hour on Friday, almost like a study group after the main day, because this Harvard course, even though it was virtual, there was a full, there was a day where you had to show up and you had to show up, they took attendance and the whole thing.

Juan:

Right, it was lit, it was real, we actually had I actually I actually took a class while I was taking off in an airplane on my Zoom, on my phone, on Zoom, like that's how that was, that's how hardcore it was, and but anyway, so we would set up this Friday afternoon or Friday morning session where we would just talk about, like, the case study, because you know those of you that know about Harvard, they do a lot of case study stuff.

Juan:

So what did we, what did we get out of the case study together? Right, and we would talk about that every single week on a cadence which, personally, you know, I thought was super valuable because, to his point, it helps us kind of see the picture together. Personally, you know, I thought it was super valuable because, to his point, it helps us kind of see the picture together. And then subsequently, I remember even though that was, like you said, late last fall, but in board meetings subsequently, like this has come up Like we've been able to apply some of the, some of the learnings that we had from that course in conversations at the board.

Amith:

That's super helpful, you know. It's one of the. The key points I really want to drive home for our listeners is that you guys personally Doug, you're not just telling your teams to go learn AI. Both of you are particularly Dale. It's outside of the scope of what most CEOs think about, because they think of it as, oh, it's a tech thing. I'm going to get my CIO to go explore it and they'll give me a report, and I think that's probably a mistake. With most technologies that are major arc changes, but certainly this one, because it changes everything in your strategic thinking. So I applaud that for one.

Amith:

And I have this group of a lot of CEOs, a lot of CXOs and a mastermind. We meet every month and we talk about a lot of this stuff, and the reason for really aggressively pulling CEOs that I know into this thing is to say, listen, you can't just let this go past you, and I really think what you're doing there is exciting. I mean, on my end, I think the main message I would want to share with our listeners is coming back to the earlier part of the story. You guys have been at this Dale for 25 years, juan. For the last five years of it, you've grown the organization by nearly 10x, it sounds. You have done that not by sitting still, but by continually, not just with ai but with all these advancements, finding a way to learn it and then be creative, deploying it, filling off legacy thinking, legacy debt of various kinds, uh, and then exploring the futures. I mean, is that a reasonable characterization of what you've been up to for the last couple decades?

Dale:

uh yeah, I think that's fair. I'm, yes, sitting still is certainly in the association world. Sitting still is death to an organization and so that's not my personality and fortunately my boards over the years and the culture of the organization has allowed that type of personality to flourish.

Mallory:

Well, I will say it sounds like Intellios is doing some incredible work and that you both have been incredibly thoughtful about how AI will impact not only your business but the communities that you serve. It seems like your organization is nimble and quick to pivot. I'm wondering can you share a little bit? I want to spend some time around organizational culture, juan, I know I pulled out a line from your bio that I thought was really interesting and it was OKRs. Agile systems thinking and adaptive organizational designs are not just methodologies to Juan, they're the foundation of his leadership philosophy. I want to spend a little bit of time there, and can you explain how explain how those systems play a role at Intellios? And can you explain how explain how?

Juan:

those systems play a role at Intellios. Yeah, this is a topic I could talk for hours on because I love it. Look, and the love fest continues when I. One of the books that was on my desk when I started at Intellios was Measure what Matters, which is a famous book by John Doerr about OKRs. I to this day, I'm still a little angry at the fact that I had spent 20 years in nonprofit technology in DC and had never heard about OKRs Right. And so that became a passion for me and, like you know, dale has kind of seen the writing on the wall that we needed something to drive outcome thinking, which is literally what OKRs are about. And so great I embraced it. I absolutely love it. So that was like a little seed Right, but from that seed right the whole thing grew, which is OK.

Juan:

So OKRs is changing how you think about the work you do. So, going from outputs which is unfortunately, I think, how a lot of companies sort of still think which is, how many widgets can you build in a day and how many hours does it take you which is great if you're running a factory. But we're not running factories, right, we're running knowledge thinking organizations that have to be a kind of different kind of nature of work. So that goes to that. Then that goes into the next part of it, which is how do we relate to each other? I touched a little bit on that about the philosophies of how do we see each other as a tech team. How do we see each other as a tech team? How do we see each other as counterparts to the business, and not even apart from the business, but in it. We're literally in it all the time, right as from tech to business.

Juan:

So, yeah, we've done things like Scrum, we've done things like Kanban, we've done all the things that came out of the West Coast and the Agile Manifesto, but that's and look, we took missteps because early on in my journey here, we tried to do scrum across the entire organization. Massive failure, and why? Because it was one framework trying to address a bunch of different kinds of work, right. So we retrenched back from that and said, okay, now currently in the organization, only one team uses scrum. Other teams use different things, right, different approaches. So that's on how we work.

Juan:

And then the systems thinking thing is exactly that, which is, how is the organization a system? How are our customers components of that system and I know it sounds a little cold to think of things that way, but not to get too hippy dippy, I'm big into seeing fractal patterns in nature and I try to look at nature and try to adapt that to how we work because, hey, guess what we're part of nature. Try to look at nature and trying to adapt that to how we work, because guess what we're part of nature, um so, so I think about it in that way and I think that's infused, uh, in our team and I think it's infused I mean, I know it has in terms of what we've brought to the table about product thinking. Other things have evolved from that moment of OKRs, right, like I two, what?

Juan:

Two months ago I was in New York attending a transformational workshop held by an amazing product leader, marty Kagan, who I love and like that, and we're bringing that into the business, right. So we've got now product managers and we think about product and we don't, we don't think about projects. We have eliminated the word projects from our company, which is, to me, everything right. It's like what is the problem to solve?

Mallory:

What's the product we need to build to solve it. That's how we start to think, to learn that have this growth mindset. This is something we spend a ton of time talking about on this podcast and at Sidecar, because it's core to what we do in terms of educating the people who work at associations in AI particularly. Have you all found success with mandating AI education? Do you highly encourage it? What does that process look like in terms of upskilling your staff?

Dale:

Yeah, we're not mandating it, but it's highly encouraged and we believe success begets success, right so? And follow your peers, and so once there's enough engagement, everyone kind of follows, and then that also helps in eliminating those who are slow to upskill are with ai. They're generally the ones that are scared of it or scared it's going to replace them, but once they once they see that that's not happening and that actually, if you use ai as a cognitive partner, no matter what part of the organization you're in and what skill sets you are employing, um, that's, that's where the uptick happens and it builds a positive culture. Mandating it uh, I don't think is is the right way to go with this. It does it take a little bit more time, sure, but you'll have a much better success at the end of the day than you would if you mandated and you had 30 percent of people disgruntled about it.

Juan:

You know that type of thing yeah, mallory, if I, if I might, a quick add on to what he. What dale just said was one of the things that I worked on relatively early, from what I can tell by asking peers. Is so AI great, mandating learning? You could do that. We don't, as he said. But what did we do? We wrote a guideline document first and then we wrote a policy document right, and it was really a policy document, was an add-on to what we already had, which was acceptable use right, every company has an acceptable use policy, hopefully. So we just made an addendum that spoke to AI-specific acceptable use practices, right. So from that point of view, yeah, you're mandating people to lean in a little bit and say read the policy, accept it, understand a little bit of it and the guideline piece, and what worries me? I don't, you know. I try, I try not to be too fervent of like AI, all the things, right, it's like AI, like everything else is going to come with some, with some ancillary drag on it and probably some evil too. Right, like all things. So having people aware of that is huge. And when I've asked people around, hey, what's your policy look like? Or hey, what's your guideline document or package? Look like it's just silence, right, just deer in the headlights on a lot of cases.

Juan:

I had a funny interaction at one of our group meetings.

Juan:

We have an annual leadership meeting where we bring together 100, 200 doctors into a room and we do a teaching, a couple of teaching days together and we were doing an AI panel and I just happened to ask the question is like I'm curious in the audience, how many of you out there have received guidance and or actual policies from your businesses on how to use AI? And the Intellio's team all raised their hands and I said, no, you guys don't count legit. I think maybe one, maybe two or none raised their hands, right, and these are people in the medical space in the developed countries, right, like it's not. And I was like shocked. Honestly, I was amazed by it, but so I think that part is important too. I'll add one last thing on that topic. For anybody that listens to this and is like I don't know where to start, find me on LinkedIn. I have these documents and I've shared them publicly with people for the good of the community, just to get you started, because I think it's that important that's awesome.

Amith:

Well, the blocking and tackling stuff the basics, the fundamentals, however you want to call it are so important people to get started with, and that's a lot of what we spend our time on this podcast and other things we do with Sidecar Resources. It's just we think this is such an important thing just even more so than AI just the idea of learning and experimentation. Learning and experimentation you know small things and keep doing it over time and it builds a lot of momentum. And you know small things but keep doing it over time and it builds a lot of momentum, and you know what you guys have done is a great example of that. On my end, I think you know you guys have shared so much great insight with our listener community and really appreciate it deeply. It's great to reconnect with you guys.

Dale:

Thanks for having us.

Mallory:

Yeah, thanks, amit. Thank you both so much for joining us. Juan, you mentioned your LinkedIn and Dale. I'm not sure if you, if you want people to keep up with you there as well, but is there any place that people can reach you and follow what you all are working on?

Dale:

Yeah, certainly can follow me on LinkedIn and uh, and then through there you know, reaching out for specific questions and things of that nature. Happy to share, share what I know and what I don't.

Mallory:

We'll drop both of those links in the show notes. Thank you both again, and, listeners, we will see you all next week.

Amith:

Thanks for tuning into Sidecar Sync this week. Looking to dive deeper? Download your free copy of our new book Ascend Unlocking the Power of AI for Associations at ascendbookorg. It's packed with insights to power your association's journey with AI. And remember, sidecar is here with more resources, from webinars to bootcamps, to help you stay ahead in the association world. We'll catch you in the next episode. Until then, keep learning, keep growing and keep disrupting.