Good evening everybody and welcome to our sixth Marketing Club webinar of the series. The values economy, how to deliver purpose driven service for sustained performance with our guest speaker tonight, Alan Williams. The Marketing Club was created primarily to help students get the most from their CIM accredited degree and to prepare them for career in marketing. Although the Marketing Club is designed for students, CIM members and other marketing practitioners are also welcome to attend these sessions. This webinar is one of a series of online events we've been running this academic year for our Marketing Club with the final two webinars coming up in April. The uninitiated, the CIM accredited degree program enables students to gain a professional marketing qualification by taking advantage of the exemptions the accredited degree provides. If you're a student you can sign up now to receive the Marketing Club newsletter. Simply take a photo of the QR code you see on screen. Each edition will provide you with content designed to support your studies and actively manage your professional development by keeping you up to date with the latest trends, innovations and concepts in the marketing industry. So I'd now like to hand over to Alan Williams of Service Brand Global who is our guest speaker today. Thanks very much Phil and good evening everybody or if you're in different parts of the world good morning or good afternoon and I'm really pleased to be joining you to be talking about the values economy and how to deliver purpose driven service for sustained performance. I don't expect you necessarily to agree with everything that I say but what I would like you to do is consider what I'm saying and maybe think about whether you agree or disagree or whether it prompts you to be curious about something that you want to look up after the event. So over the next 45 minutes or hour including the Q&A we're going to really have three sprints. We're going to have a sprint on the concept of values. We're then going to move through the context in which values exist and the changing landscape that we're experiencing. And then we're going to talk about the importance of alignment in sprint three and what you can actually do to equip an organization to thrive in this landscape. Now for those of you that are in marketing roles already the bottom right you can see there the contemplative character and another go and the reason for this is that at the end of the day if nothing happens as a result of this talk why have we all been here together? So if you're in a role thinking what is it that you're going to do even if they're small things what is it that you're going to do differently as a result of what we've heard and if you're studying similar but perhaps related to your studies what is it that's piqued your curiosity? What is it that you want to learn more about? Now I mentioned these three sprints so as a bit of a warm up really these four quotes summarize everything that I'm going to talk about in the next 45 minutes and there's a bit of a breakfast thing going on there which I think is going to make me hungry at this time of the day but never mind. The first one is often incorrectly attributed to Peter Drucker so culture eats strategy for breakfast and again I'm not sure how much business experience many of you will have but in my 30 years in business I've seen loads of brilliant strategies in documentation that actually fail to materialize and that's because the culture has not been grown or flourished to enable the application of that strategy and allow it to be realized so culture really is by far the most important element of the two. Then a quote by Terry Dillon Alan Kennedy culture is the way we do things around here I love that simplicity of the quote it really is just in an organization what happens around here that is the culture it's not what is written on the wall it's not what people say happens it's what does happen around here and then the final two quotes are mine actually so the first one values are for living not laminating and you can see a picture of a mug there you know you'll be familiar with organizations with the values all up on the wall sometimes etched into the stone of the wall that's impressive isn't it but actually what's most important is the values are brought to life and then finally really playing on the the first quote culture eats strategy for breakfast I only only thought of that this one when was it December I think it was last year and that is content without context is toast and what I mean by this is that how often do we go to conferences or talks like this where content is delivered that's what I'm delivering today but what you cannot do is take that content and just drop it in to another context so let's say there are two of you out there working for different organizations with very different styles personalities values what you need to be able to do is apply the content in today's talk and adapt it to fit for your particular context and if you don't do that it the likelihood is that it will not work so those four quotes are kind of like a an intro to the session and kind of summarize everything that I'm going to touch on in a bit more detail so let's go to the first sprint so this is the concept of values and our first co-authored book was published in 2013 and my goodness that's eight years which seems an age especially with COVID in between I think you know everything pre-covid seems like another lifetime actually and values has become a real hot topic in that eight years and you you barely hear a news announcement or read something in the press today without the values word being mentioned but what is it you know what what are our values and I'm just going to pause there for a second because we use the word very freely nowadays but are we really considering what it means so just just take 15 or 20 seconds to ask that question to yourself and consider what our values to you so I'm hoping that some of you will be along the lines of well values are what's really important deep down values are what you won't give up for anything they are deeply deeply important but actually the definition that I really like is this one values are emotionally laden motivators they are a behavioral and decision-making compass now some academics make the whole examination of values a whole lot more complicated than this talking about different levels different types and that's all fine but I like to keep this topic very simple and think of values as these emotionally laden motivators so these values are the things that guide us towards the choices and decisions and behaviors that we make when we choose to use them in a conscious way and I find that by keeping it in that simple way it's me certainly be able to use values at a very conscious level without getting confused by the complexity that some people attach to the topic and just because I'm saying that values are important well you know so what who am I but actually other people say that values are important to Simon Sinek is somebody that you might well have come across because he's very well known and very well regarded quite rightly so and he talks about the golden circle of the what the how and the why and you can see on the slide here that there are definitions of each of those three the point though is that Simon talks about how in business we spend kind of 80% of our time focused on the what but actually what engages people had an emotional level hearts and minds is the why and the how so the purpose the why and the values the how and yet in business we don't talk about that very much at all we're focused on the what now he uses an Apple example Apple the company to demonstrate this and whilst I think Apple might be overused in this sort of business presentation I do think that this is a very very good example and what he says is that you know Apple say the reason why we are here is to make the world a better place and how we're going to do that is by making really user-friendly technology and what that looks like is an iPhone and iPod and iPad and the rest he then says compare that with Dell sorry anybody from Dell it may be things have changed since this this was quoted and but compare that with Dell he says who say do you want to buy a laptop which is totally uncompelling so the why and the how is what engages people and what we should be spending more of our time on when we're talking to people in our business instead of all of the focus and energy and time on the what these studies also quote values as being critical so IBM surveying 1700 chief executive officers and them quoting imperatives of empowering employees through values and the importance of shared beliefs to guide decision-making and the processes and tools around that then the next one in the middle we've got a PWC similar survey 1400 chief executive officers 93% of them agreeing that it's important to have a strong corporate purpose that is reflected in their organization's values culture and behavior and then the financial reporting council have reviewed their corporate governance code to include a responsibility for boards to create a culture based on their values and to report on their progress against that over the long term now if that's implemented with teeth that could be a real game changer now let's just consider the evolution of the customer relationship and we're going to use coffee as an example here so way back when coffee beans were just a commodity they were traded as such and then the next stage of evolution was that you could go into a shop and you could buy a bag of coffee beans which you would take home to brew your coffee and then the next stage of evolution was that a service was offered so this is when instead of going into the shop to buy your bag of coffee beans you could actually go into the shop and buy a cup of brewed coffee it became a service and then this graph is based on the work of pine and Gilmore who created the concept of the experience economy and Starbucks is a great example where you know they say what's your name and then when your coffee is ready they shout your name and you walk down the street with your branded cup in your hand showing the world that you're a Starbucks customer nowadays the customer experience is still promoted by many consultants and many people in businesses being the real forefront of progressive business but if we think about this I mentioned just now that the experience economy was created by pine and Gilmore but in the 1990s now that's more than 20 years ago that's actually in the last century so the question is have things not changed over that period of time and I suggest that it has I suggest that we have moved on from an experience being what we're looking for and what impresses us to a situation where what we're looking for is a sense of shared values now imagine that you are visiting a theme park and it's fantastic they've got a brilliant reputation for customer experience the rides are all fantastic the food and beverage is brilliant they just deliver a wonderful experience but then you find out that they're using slave labor perhaps in parts of the world or they're underpaying employees perhaps for some people that will be enough for them to no longer even consider doing business or being a customer of that organization an example of Tesla the highlighted words here companies customers would volunteer to help distribute its vehicles contributing to a project that they consider themselves to be part of the second highlight people want to be part of a project that is not about selling cars but changing the world so what Elon must realize was that his customers were not just customers they were part of a movement and that is a totally different ball game the values economy had already arrived but COVID-19 has been a real turbo boost and I'll just give you an example I was doing a workshop not very long ago and talking about this this concept and I asked if the audience could relate to this and one lady in the audience from Scotland explained that she had been to a wonderful restaurant in fact it was a business with a chain of restaurants and the particular one that she liked best was a Michelin star restaurant and every time she had a celebration or a special treat or some extra money where they could afford to go out somewhere like that that's where they would go food was faultless so was the service then she heard a story about how allegedly the company have been treating their employees not very well no need to go into the detail and it transpired that the human resources director in the company was actually the spouse of the owner so it wasn't even a case of well we were unlucky with a human resources director so we've made a change and what she explained was that finding that out made her did make the decision to never visit that restaurant again to actually tell people that they should not go there rather than recommend it and this is significant because when we think about the importance that we attached to values in the example that I've just given you that she related values were more important to her than the experience which she could not fault so you can see how significant this stuff is we'll now move on to the changing landscape and just to put this in context itself we are experiencing a rate of change that is faster than it has ever been before and so who knows where this is going to go in the next one to five to ten years but for now I just want to concentrate on three particular drivers which mean that values are more important now than they have ever been before and the chances are that they will be more important yet again as we go forward these three drivers we refer to as C to the power of three and it's a perfect storm of choice communication and control and I'll deal with each of these in turn so first some statistics the reason I like to use these is because the whole area of values is sometimes criticized as being kind of warm and fluffy it's not and I hope that these statistics demonstrate this clearly so 82 percent of people will pay more for a brand that shares their values 74 percent of people say that brand should try and make the world a better place and 52 percent of people have bought a brand for the first time because of that brand's values so we're making decisions on this much more emotional values based level than we did before when perhaps we were just encouraged to consider what's the best value for money what am I getting for my money there's a prediction here from Forrester that 50 percent of customers will buy from brands whose values match their own this year and that's an increase of 15 percent on last year and to re-emphasize this point about the rational versus emotional considerations you can see the shift in the 20-odd years since 1997 where people are making the decisions much much more on an emotional basis than they are on a rational basis now we can translate this into some quotes from Howard Schultz again continuing this coffee theme but I love these because they're so simple and when you hear them or when I read them it's obvious authentic brands don't emerge from marketing cubicles or advertising agencies they emanate from everything the company does and mass advertising can help build brands but authenticity is what makes them last if people believe they share values with the company they will stay loyal to the brand and the reason this is so important is the bottom quote here which is that it takes years and years to build trust it takes very little time to break and it can take forever to repair so sometimes you're not able to do that and this is particularly important in an age where your nearest competitor is just one click away for your customer you know just think of that you're really really reliant on the authenticity of your brand time over time over time rather than one flash successful lucky add though and I love this quote from Maya Angelou to sum up this whole thing I've learned that people will forget what you said people forget what you do but people will never forget how you made them feel so let's play a game 2018 these figures are from and this brand started in 1994 global sales in 2018 we're approaching 10 billion pounds and in the UK sales were 1.6 billion 6,000 product lines so again let me just give you a few seconds to consider what that brand might be in live events have all sorts of suggestions from Amazon to retail other retail in the real world brick and mortar retail based outlets manufacturing companies automotive company came up once but actually this brand is fair trade and the reason that I think this is such a good example is because fair trade on the shelf goods people are willing to pay a premium of sometimes up to around about 30% and the reason why they're willing to pay that premium is because they believe in the way that that got on to the shelf they believe in it it's not about what am I getting for my money that's the rational approach it's the I believe this is the white thing for me to do the emotional approach so let's move on to communication and you can look up both of these YouTube clips if you search for United Airlines US Olympic team that's the one on the left and United Breaks guitars for the one on the right so these are two YouTube clips from United Airlines the first one you can imagine it can't you it's something like we are United Airlines we have flown the United States Olympic team to the Olympic Games for the last blah blah blah they've spent their hard earned marketing budget on that advert on YouTube the number of hits that that's received last time it looked it was around about 16 and a half thousand so hard earned marketing budget 16 and a half thousand views to influence people United Breaks guitars is a clip by a musician called Dave Carroll who was flying with United and they broke his guitar he spent about a year trying to sort it out to no avail and in frustration he wrote a song called United break guitars which you can guess have more than 16,000 views on YouTube in fact it's approaching 20 million views now the reason this is important is because social media has just cranked up the volume of communication beyond belief and the important distinction between these two is that whilst United Airlines controlled their marketing spend and that advert they had zero control over the Dave Carroll YouTube clip now to put this into perspective in the six months after the United Breaks guitars video went live the United Airlines share price fell by around about 10% and there was lots of discussion at the time you know was this because of this video or was it because of other stuff and in our book in our first book we kind of I suppose we sat on the fence a little bit here but what we said was we don't think it helped their performance so social media turns up the volume and the reason that that video is such a good example is because we listened to not the organizations themselves and their official messaging but we listened to what other people say you know just think about your your own experience and TripAdvisor for instance you know how many of us look at the the hotel website or the restaurant website or do we first go and see what other people say about it and then the third C is control it used to be in the past that a company would lock themselves away or hire some experts to do the thinking for them and come up with the messages that they wanted to send out there and then they would do that through various means like marketing public relations advertising and the like and it's almost like they would close their eyes cross their fingers and hope that enough people would believe their message well control is shifting and now what's happening is that companies need to realize that they actually co-own their brand with their stakeholders and in fact not just their customers employees service partners local communities are all stakeholders who co-own the brand you know imagine yourself you're out you meet somebody you say to them oh what job do you do who do you work for what's it like to work there what do you think they do do you think that they go to their phone go to their company website and give you the spiel that is there the official message or do they tell you about their felt experience and even if you were given the choice to look at the official website and then hear their view who do you believe it's their version not the official one so the successful brands of the future are going to be those that are able to establish a sense of shared values and culture with all of the various stakeholders just one final point on the consistency piece here because you know that no longer is it good enough to have a fancy face to your customers but treat your employees poorly or your service partners because because of the communication see the truth gets out fast previously it might never have got out at all now it's only a question of time so shared values and culture with all of your stakeholder groups consistently and this is so much more important where people are the organization you know it's it's the person that answers the phone in the help center it's the security guy at the car park barrier it's the food server it's the receptionist that checks you into the hotel these are the people that form the customers view of their organizations and just a little bit of what's happening in the world around values at the moment so 73% of companies have between three and seven corporate values but look at the right-hand chart integrity collaboration customer respect the same old same old values being trotted out by these organizations and because of this people kind of don't treat them seriously you know they become like wallpaper they become invisible and we'll come to how you can deal with this better as shortly and this same piece of research actually discovered that there was no correlation between corporate official values and what was happening in those organizations now you might say well that's terrible what an indictment on industry but actually if you take a slightly more optimistic view what a brilliant opportunity for you if you can get it right and a very topical story P&O ferries many of you will have seen what's happened here and there is a real stakeholder backlash here not just the employees that have been terribly dealt with and affected but they've got the unions to deal with as well customers I've heard saying I'm never going to use P&O ferries again other customers even confusing P&O ferries with P&O cruises and making that connection so that the ripple effect of this is actually more than you might imagine local communities like Dover having really understandably strong feelings about this service partners as well because who wants to be dealing with a company that is seen to behave like that and unusually the government is even getting involved which we don't often see but perhaps that's another evolution of just how many different stakeholders get involved at this values level so the third sprint to finish with is well what can we do about this and the fundamental principle is about using alignment to create your plan to take action the service brand approach I created when I created service brand global and when I was thinking about how I would present the offer to the market I just thought back on all of the roles that I had had mostly in the hospitality sector and asked myself what were the common themes what were what were the threads that meant that I had achieved the great results in each of those jobs that had been achieved and when I build it down it was very very simple and this is what the service brand approaches today on the left hand side of the screen you can see three circles and the bottom right is brand so this is about having crystal clarity about the character personality and identity of your brand so this is not the logo right this is who you are as an organization then we move to the left this is everything to do with the employee how do you get engaged employees all of your people processes and the final one is the customer so the customer experience how is this delivered consistently irrespective of time geography or channel now in businesses in in organizations not just businesses so you could take a public sector organization for instance the brand the employee and the customer stuff is owned by different functions even in smaller companies this can be the case so brand is owned by marketing employee is owned by HR or people and culture increasingly termed as people and culture and the customer is owned by the operations or service delivery teams what can happen is that these three functions devise their own unilateral strategies don't talk to each other and then they're shocked that it doesn't work so the service brand approach is very simple in that it says you really need to align the development of your strategic thinking across these three areas and you then need to coordinate the execution of it and what that will do is generate additional value you'll have a differentiated brand you'll have engaged employees and you'll have advocate customers now I'm still an operator at heart and so I'd just like to give you a practical example to demonstrate this approach I worked for an investment bank and they're marketing people so looking after the brand and come up with the strap line of the company name people are fitter so at a tube station in London they had these massive banners all over the inside of the tube station with XYZ company people are fitter at the same time many of you will be familiar with the rider bike to work scheme so basically it's giving your employees a tax break if they want to buy a bicycle human resources have communicated this to the workforce but they have not referenced the company name people are fitter missed opportunity then in their offices the people that deliver the employee experience is a function called facilities management or corporate real estate services so human resources have not spoken to these people either and as a result guess what there was no safe place to put your bike in the car park in the basement how crazy is that you spent your hard earned money that you've been encouraged to spend by the company with a tax break deal but there's no a safe to park it now move to the right hand side of this slide and imagine if the service brand approach had been taken what would have happened well human resources would have communicated the rider bike to work scheme referencing because our company people are fitter and they would also have said and we've got a bike racks and maybe at the back of the bike rack you've got the company name and our people are fitter the back and we got shower facilities in the basement as well so that you can freshen up on your way to work you see the difference for very little additional investment you create a whole lot of extra value and I translate this into and I'm just going to use my cursor to identify brand employee and customer which is supported by two other elements one is systems and processes and this is kind of the infrastructure of the business everything that makes it go around and everything goes in here from the organization structure to governance processes to the communication framework all of that stuff but the reason it goes in this box is because it's sole purpose should be to help brand employee and customer experience go round and be at their best and then the final element is this one over here measurement and insight so getting data about performance and feedback from various stakeholders this in effect is an operational excellence model and you can see from this that what happens is that you're doing stuff tactically receiving in the moment data about your performance and responding in a tactical way at the same time this data is captured to feed into a more strategic business planning process so let me give you an example of a hotel company and it might be that they've got hotels all the way around the country and they're experiencing an issue with let's say the checkout a stage of the customer experience for the time being they're allowing the individual business units the hotels to do their best to correct this but they're discovering that this is actually not shifting in a positive way and so they might choose to invest in a program that is across the company for a six month program for instance to deal with the specific issue of checkout across the whole portfolio and by using this approach you really generate these business outcomes where people are focused on service excellence they're focused on always being better being able to scale and a culture that everybody can buy into so as we approach the conclusion of this there are some key messages that I'd like you to consider as takeaways the first is that there are many people out there that purport to have a silver bullet that's going to be the savior and it's not it really isn't there is no silver bullet but I do believe that alignment is critical and the key but it's more like a spider's web so loads of activity happening which is crisscrossed to give you that strength remember that employees are the organization and if you remember that the people in front of your customers have a disproportionately important impact on your customers perception of your organization you know I used to be a managing director of a five star hotel but I understood that it was the person on the golf course the person in the spa the person at reception the waiter in the restaurant those were the people that had the biggest impact you need to know where your north is your culture and your values and to take action to praise it when it's in place and to correct it when people stray from it this values driven approach is really your best chance of creating loyalty not only for your clients customers but also your employees the quote from the beginning about values needing to be lived not laminated don't fall into the trap of thinking that once you've done the road show and you've shared with everybody what your values are that's it job done no it's not day after day every single person that's the way to do it and for those of you that are marketing professionals you might not agree with this but I do think that clients customers and other stakeholders are the new marketing department in some way so this is the values economy in reality is here but also remember this that for you to be successful over time it is hard work it really is hard work so be prepared for that also remember you know I have some I have people saying to me oh Alan we're not going to look at our values and culture just yet because we're so busy with some other stuff as though nothing's going to happen in the interim well you need to face the reality if the you if you do not intentionally shape your values and culture something will develop anyway and it might not be what you wanted leaders have a lot of responsibility and privilege actually here because they need to lead in practice and show by example remember also that practice makes more perfect we'll never reach perfection but practice practice practice does help and it's the real world so sometimes it happens sometimes it happens like we weren't expecting or we didn't want but when that does happen just get over it and move on is what I would advise so remember finally that the way people behave can reinforce the organization's values or not there's kind of no in between so we've been through our three sprints thank you very much dealing with the concept of values the context of our changing landscape and how alignment can help action be most effective but for now over to you for questions observations reflections and comments okay Alan thank you very much that was that was brilliant some very thought-provoking ideas there we're going to head into our Q&A session and we've got one or two questions already you should get to in a second but please do continue to post your questions and we'll try and get through as many as we can in the next ten minutes or so just a couple of quick stories from me actually Alan one concerning P&O Ferries I'm actually an advocate of P&O cruisers have been on several cruises myself and within a day had an email from P&O cruisers distancing themselves from P&O Ferries just to let let me know that they had nothing to do with P&O Ferries I knew that already the second little story is around Starbucks because in my hometown they recently opened up a brand new Starbucks at that's dead opposite the cafe Nero which is our favorite our favorite coffee shop but we thought we'd try at Starbucks and we went in there I think it's the first day that actually opened the service was lousy the coffee that they made was absolutely disgusting and I was charged an extra 20 pence for the privilege of getting a disgusting coffee so I won't go back there again so I guess I didn't have no idea what Starbucks values actually are but my own personal experience of Starbucks on that one occasion has put me off going there for the duration so I'll go back to Cafe Nero. That's my two little stories. Cafe Nero would be delighted to hear those stories. Yeah and I hope they give me a free one for that. Okay so our first question then is how can you sort of square off the drive towards economic growth and with also on the flip side to that you know our need to behave in a sustainable way or for business to behave sustainably. How do those two sort of competing values fit together? I don't think they do and so for me it's about being true to who you are rather than being seen as wanting to make a quick buck and those organizations that are authentic will be around much longer than those who will be found out. Okay so answer. Do you think the mindset of values over experience best represents the younger generation rather than those in Gen X and older perhaps? Yeah so from the research that I've read there is an indication that younger people are leading the way on this but actually and maybe surprisingly there wasn't as much of a differentiator or Delta as I was expecting for sure and even older generations myself and even older than that are also making decisions based on values rather than a more rational or even financial consideration. Now what I would say is that it'll be interesting to see you know what's gonna happen with what's happening with the economy at the moment where people are finding it tougher so I think there will be a challenge for some people because I'm not looking at this through rose-tinted glasses and saying that you know everybody is going to always be making a values-based decision and perhaps some people will be in a position where they're saying well actually I do normally buy fair trade goods but I'm having to make choices and maybe I'm gonna stop doing that because I can't afford it. So I think that the whole thing around values is that some people do paint it to be this panacea of light and loveliness and actually I take a very different view that it's a very very practical nitty gritty way to help you make difficult choices and decisions. I was on a webinar a while ago now but somebody said to me do values compete and I said well yeah absolutely and found myself making up this hypothetical story of a guy whose two core values was family and peace. This guy was out of work and had a partner and a young child to feed. He was offered a job in an ammunition factory. So what does he do? He might consider it and decide that he's going to take the job in order to feed his family but for every minute he's not working he's going to be looking for another job because he hates working there and doesn't want to work there for any longer than he has to but that's the reality of it right where values can help you make a choice and for you to feel comfortable with the choice that you've arrived at. Okay I mean there are a couple of questions around the cost of living crisis which are just sort of referenced. I guess this is a follow-up so the question is how does rational and emotional purchases play out with people on the lower end of the socio-economic ladder? Can they afford to be concerned about values in the same way? Yeah and that's exactly the point that I was just making where people will have to make their choices and sometimes if you haven't got the money to be able to buy that fair trade product then maybe you won't but there are other alternatives as well. I just discovered Olio over the weekend so this is an app which is all about eliminating food waste so if you've got food that is coming up to its null by date or you're not going to use anymore you can put it on this app and people can come and collect it. I just tried it over the weekend and the stuff that I put on there was claimed within an hour and so there are creative ways that things can be dealt with as well but I think that the real answer to this question is not about black and white it's more about people using their values to make choices that are right for them in a situation. I think this is a related question so you put up some statistics earlier about the fact that 50% of people are more likely to buy brands whose values match their own so that was the overall percentage but does there any sort of demographic biases in that particular piece of research? Yes, a forester are brilliant so if you just if you go well you can use the link that was on this presentation or you can Google forester values research they've been working in this space for around about seven years now and they do break it down into various sections by age by socio-economic grouping and others so you can get a very clear understanding of where the differences are but I think what still stands true is that those differences are less pronounced than we might imagine and actually there's a guy called David Allison I've got his book in a pile here and what he's advocating is that the ways in which we've segmented markets in the past might not be as useful as we thought they were and he advocates a values based segmentation which I find really fascinating. Okay this is really good to know what was the what was the name of that again author again so here we are we are all the same now value graphics by David Allison maybe he'll buy if I drank coffee maybe he'd buy me one yeah but not in Starbucks probably and why did you use the analogy of sprinting in this presentation why is everything a sprint? That's a nice question so the reason I use that is because I sometimes find presentations like this pretty dull and boring and people are kind of psyched up oh my god I'm going to be sitting here listening to this stuff for 45 minutes nearly an hour so the reason I use this was to get a bit of energy into people and for them to be thinking okay I'm going to be doing a sprint and then another one and then another one which feels for me a bit more acceptable than a 45 minute trudge. Okay so so it wasn't a reference to the fact that you know you need to be quick about this you need to make sure that you get your your values in a row you don't dilly-dally over it but I guess we need to take the time so. No it wasn't that but and actually I would say the reverse I would say take your time about understanding your values and be certain that they're the right ones and live with them as you go rather than be in a hurry treat it as a learning journey. Okay just one final question before we we have to wrap up this evening so obviously we've got a quite a large number of students on the event this evening looking perhaps for their first job in the big bad world how can you gauge whether a company that you might be interested in working for actually shares your own values or that there's going to be a good match between the two. How should you go about that? Yeah well you can do your research but I would suggest that if you can connect with people in the organization and ask them rather than look at the official corporate stuff and then if you're involved in a recruitment and selection process how are you treated you know it's a really good measure I remember a job where I was kept waiting at interview for an hour and I ignored the signal and I took the job but it was a mistake so listen to the experience how you're treated by everybody in the organization that's a really good indicator. That's great that's great advice thank you very much Alan. Okay we have some good questions there and it's a shame we've run out of time to get through more but thank you very much for answering the ones that you did some really great advice and hopefully some useful tips that I'll be able to take away with them this evening. Sadly that's all the time we have for our webinar tonight I'd like to say thanks to Alan for his excellent presentation and we do hope that you've found it interesting and worthwhile. We'll be back with our next Marketing Club webinar boost your employability on Wednesday the 6th of April and with a slight change of time for this one it's at one o'clock that's 1 p.m. On behalf of CIM that just leaves me to thank Alan once again for a fantastic presentation and to say thank you to you for joining us today we hope you've enjoyed the session and we look forward to welcome you again to our webinars in the future. Take care everybody.


Welcome to Sheboygan County Government, working for you. My name is Adam Payne, Sheboygan County Administrator and co-host of this program with Chairman Mike Van der Steen. And as you know, every month we try to bring to you another department and we've got a number of them. 22 departments, nearly 1,000 employees, 206 programs and services. And we have one department head in particular who has to provide infrastructure and service to all of the 21 other department heads to keep them running. And that's our Information Systems Director, Joyce Schneider. Joyce, thanks for joining us today. Thank you. Joyce has the tremendous task of making sure that the software and hardware needs, computers are taking care of all of that important infrastructure for all departments to run. And if anything breaks down, she hears about it. Thank you. Joyce, please begin by telling us a little bit about yourself and when you first started with the county. Thank you. I was going to say, I have a degree in data processing and a minor in accounting. And I worked for medalist industries in Oshkosh after I graduated for almost two years. I married my husband, Joseph, and we moved to the Sheboygan area in 1974. I started for Sheboygan County as a programmer. I went back to school during that time while working full time and I also earned a degree in management. And in 1982, an opportunity came up and I was promoted to the director for the department and have held that role ever since. So you have had the pleasure of being the IS director since 1982. 82, right. 82. And you could probably count on one hand how many complaints you've received. Exactly. I know that you get a lot of flack from department heads when things fall apart, whether it's your responsibility or a lightning strike, but you're always the troubleshooter and the ones getting folks back up online. What is the primary mission and responsibilities of the IS department? Well the mission of the department is to support, assist, and guide in the growth of the advancement in Sheboygan County. And over the course of the last few years, the county has consolidated in a cost-saving effort so that the department has also expanded so that we're also the payroll department. We have the courier system. We have the printing department and we have the mail room for the county as well. But your fundamental role is? Still the information systems department. And we support 22 counties. We support the various federal and state agencies that they work with as well as vendors that are out there as well. And we do have 11 buildings out there that we support. 22 county departments. 22 county departments. Nearly a thousand employees. How many computers just? We have over about 2,000 pieces of equipment. There are PCs. There's printers. There's scanners and flotters and communication switches. So there are various pieces of equipment out there too. So there's a number of layers. When you have issues, what you have to check out and make sure that's still working for you. There's always upgrades and ongoing maintenance. How many employees are in your department that are interacting with all the other department heads in providing this assistance? We have 14 employees that are full-time. We have one temp employee. We have actually out of those 14, seven that are the technical staff for the IS. And then we have three accounting clerical people. And then we have two in our payroll department. We have one in the courier and our temp. And we have one in the printing department as well. Do you ever feel like just taking a break and just getting in the mail truck and driving around as a courier for the day just to kind of get your head out of the game or are you probably not? Not really. I was going to say I love data processing. I love the automation and the changes. And I think that's why I've always been in it. What are some of the key challenges that you and your staff experience day in and day out? I would say probably the key challenges right now is the growth in automation as fast as it's growing and the mobility of it. You have more laptops out there. You have GPS units. You have blackberries out there. And the issue is always to make sure that you secure those pieces of equipment and also encrypt the data if something never happens to them or they get lost at that point in time. Along with that, you've got the bandwidth issues that you have the bandwidth and the communications up and going. And it's the storage issue because as you gather more information, your data growth is also expanding what is needed for your hard drives and also how you back that information up and secure it for the county as well too. And all that information does have to be backed up and stored for I think up to seven years, is it not? In some cases, more. Because I was going to say depending on the departments, you have some retention taxes in some cases have to be stored up to 15 years. Financials are seven. Depending on health and human services, some of that has to be out there for the duration of the case or the client that they're working with. Same thing with law enforcement, depending on the particular case that they have out there, it needs to be retained permanently. And register of deeds is one that you keep out there forever because land goes on from generation to generation. So the data that you want to keep out there needs to be protected. I think it's remarkable the reliance that people now have on their computers. And our viewers watching this, certainly if they rely on a computer, work with the computer every day. If the system goes down, not only is it really frustrating, but every now and then you'll hear from a co-worker, well, geez, there's nothing I can do until this is brought up. And I always find that somewhat remarkable because I know there's phone calls to return or paper to file or other things that can be done. Materials to read on the reading pile that we never seem to get around to. But without question, your department has such an important role with keeping folks working hard and keeping those systems up and running. As you look back at the last few years, what do you see as some of the most critical challenges that you've faced? I guess some of the ones that we've seen as some of the stuff has been changing. And that's exactly as keeping the equipment up, being able to be notified as soon as possible. We've set up a help desk so that we can at least address the issues as quick as possible. We have software that we can remote out to some of the remote buildings so that we don't have to have staff leave that department as well also. And we've installed video conferencing in our courtrooms. So this is equipment and telecommunication that they're expecting have up every day and they rely on it. So yeah, we put UPS systems in. So if we do have power outages in certain areas, we can at least maintain some of that even if it's in a limited state at that point in time. And we do see more and more webinars taking place where the state is doing additional training so that there's less travel between agencies and yet they can still communicate. So it is getting to be more of a critical condition out there for them to stay up. All our focus has been predominantly on the 22 departments in Sheboygan County. But really, it's not just the county departments that you're supporting or assisting the law enforcement agencies throughout the county. All the towers that we have in place for communications throughout the county, tremendous responsibility in your department. I think your relationship with the city of Sheboygan, all the municipalities, you're just always there and helping. Please touch on that a little bit. Yeah, it's not an eight hour day job. I says, usually working 12 hours sometimes a day. And we have staff on call 24 hours and we rotate that through the staff. And they carry a cell phone or a pager along with them. And a number of times when they could get the calls, it may just be something that they can take care of on the phone. Or if they need to come in, they'll replace a monitor and we might have a spare one sitting there for them. But yeah, staff are on call 24 hours. So I says, it's a whole career. Very good. Thank you, Joyce. Joyce, in 2002, the county developed a website with the work of your department. That's really turned into a nice tool and a good resource for the people in the area. It's www.co.sheboygan.wi.us. But could you tell us a little bit about what kind of a resource this is for our constituents? Sure. We've expanded. It has grown and it's grown very well as far as the usage. And we can see that because we have put notices on the front page. So if there's events that are coming up, we try to keep people informed of, let's say something from the veteran's office or when we had the H1N1 flu, the nurses used that quite a bit to put the clinics out. Get the information out so that we were giving the correct information out there as well. We have road construction out there. And then within the various departments, they have information as far as most frequently asked questions so that constituents can look up. We've done surveys through the planning department for them. So it definitely has seen a growth out there and we collect taxes. Through right now, we've got from starting in the year 2000, if you looked at your tax bills, they are out there as well too. So people can go out and compare that. They can see maps out there now. So there's a lot more information being used by a number of various people out there as well. Just touched on maps. We've been working hard to develop a good geographical information system. Could you explain a little bit about the GIS is and how it is a attribute for our citizens as well as our departments to utilize this information? Sure. GIS is used by a number of departments in the county. And what we did a few years ago is we were able to bring a GIS person on our staff into information systems and we centralized it onto a database. So we were able to collect all that information that we had developed over the years, created the layers out there, not just for the tax parcels, but photos, contours, waterways and stuff, road names and that out there. And by the ability of doing that and putting it on a database, we have law enforcement using it. We have public health using it, registered deeds, a number of departments now that are using those maps and that out there in various ways. And that is continuing to grow. We see that a lot out there. We're talking about now putting some software out there for our planning department. And we see them using the GIS as well also in an extended way. That's great. You've also been involved in preparing our Coney Atlas, which we print on a bi-yearly basis. Could you explain a little bit about how your department gets involved in that and where people can pick up an Atlas? Sure. Because we did develop it now and put it onto a database, it's much easier to extract the information electronically. So we have been doing the actually Atlas development internally within the county and then submitting it to someone to print. And we're actually looking at if in the future we could reduce our cost by maybe printing that internally as well also. And it can be picked up in various departments. We've expanded that besides the Treasurer. I know the Register of Deeds has it, Planners has it, County Clerks has it out there. And I think we even have a few at the highway department. So we've tried to place them where constituents are coming in and it makes it easier for them to be able to pick one up. You also have been working hard with our Sheriff's Department. They've been upgrading our emergency 911 system. Could you explain a little bit about what work you've been doing with that department? 911 was also part of GPS and that was a geographical system as well. And that is now completed and in place. And that was the use of the cellular phone so that when a call came in and the cell phone of the caller had a GPS internal within that cell phone, it would give the address to the dispatcher at that time so they could dispatch out where that location was and who the first responder, the Sheriff's Department or Police Department, whoever was the caller at the time. And that is in place. And if you didn't have that when the call came in, what it did is by using GPS and your LATs and longs, it would give you a triangularization where it would create an area. And so if you were rural, it would also be able to kind of pinpoint within an area where you were and still be able to send out the emergency vehicles out there for them. And that has been very helpful. I mean, we've used it in the Marsh a few times. I know that it has helped as far as being able to find people that were utilizing the 911 cell system. And it's amazing how everybody's using cell phones now. It's really needed. And I'm glad to see we're changing and keeping up with that technology. The county also keeps a tremendous amount of records. As you explained earlier, some have to be kept for seven years and some forever. And I know you're going through an imaging process with many of the county departments. Could you give us a little bit of history on where that is and what advantage that is for the county to image these documents? Yeah. What we did a few years back is we bought an enterprise imaging system. And we started with our accounts payable department. And we brought them up really first. And so all the invoices coming into the county are scanned in. And this eliminated a lot of physical storage that was needed. Plus, you know, the staff time to go back and do the filing and set up the folders and everything. And that was very successful. So because it's an enterprise, it means all of our departments have that ability to use it. So we've expanded it to bringing in tax information, excuse me, tax information as well. And now we're going to be doing permits for our planning department also. That's great. Well, with that information, I'll turn it back over to Adam to wrap up. Joyce is probably coughing because she knows the next question is dealing with our budget. And of course, anytime we talk about the county budget, we all start coughing a little bit. It's been a challenging decade, frankly, for all levels of government. The economy, certainly the last few years has made it even more so. But as you look ahead, I think we're just in for more challenge.  Every department head needs to prepare a budget. And what makes yours more challenging than many is, of course, you're allocating your costs to other departments. And they always look at that and wonder, hmm, is this right? Or how do I reduce those costs? What are you, what's your sense of the budget process as we go forward in the next year, two years? How do you see that playing with your department? And how do you feel you can continue to be successful in these times of great budget constraints? Yeah, I was going to say what I've been trying to do as the budget has been changing. I'm always trying to look to save money in different areas. And we've consolidated a number of areas. We've saved money in some of those areas quite a bit over the years. I've been looking at mass storage areas where we can extend the time of those units maybe to a longer period of time for saving. Maintenance contracts I've extended. We've been using lot less energy as we replace some of the older equipment. So we have seen the savings through our building services department as well. We've consolidated some of the department's equipment. I know that we have equipment for the DA's office. And we also just finished bringing up today the last of the CCAP equipment. So there's more space in different areas as well, too. We've taken advantage of any software that is out there so that staff can push software out to equipment. They don't always necessarily have to go to the user as they did in the past. That has helped us out as well, too. The only bad thing is a lot of times if we do see savings and we save within a various department, we don't get the revenue back into our own department. So the best I can do right now is try to keep mine as an even keel to help those departments out because they don't always see it because our costs may not go down. But if I can avoid from them going up, that should help them out as well, too. And you've done a very good job in that regard. So you have come up with a number of opportunities for savings. We have garnered efficiencies. We're always striving to do that more. Yet at the same time, we either need to ride the wave of technology or we can get buried underneath it. And you know how important it is to keep up with new infrastructure and new software hardware. Even with the limited budgets, you're making good things happen. What are some of the upcoming projects or investments we're going to be making in Sheboygan County in the technology area? Our Registrar of Deeds has a new upgrade coming up here this next year. And that's probably, the last upgrade probably was about three, four years ago. So this is, you know, getting our hair first in a long time. We have a planning project that's going to put out to the web, a new application for some of the septic pumpers out there so that they can actually access and enter the information online versus coming to the courthouse and filling out the documents. They can do that right online. And that should be up. It's going to be put in place January 1st of 2011. And we're going to be starting the implementation probably this next month. And we're going to also have for our squad cars for the Sheriff's Department. And I need to do a server upgrade this year as well, too. And right after the first of the year, we did upgrade our financial system, which was probably about two years ago with an upgrade on the server and the financial software. So that will take us out another two, three years again, too. So we've expanded the life on that. I know Chairman Van der Steen was looking to see wireless put into the administration building. And you recently got that done. And you've also made some nice improvements out at Rocky Knoll. Please touch on that. We've expanded as far as the communications out there as well, too. We boosted the signals out there so that the speed is a lot better out there. We've also put a wireless and various buildings out there. And we've actually upgraded the hubs communication equipment out there. So they are going to be ready for voiceover IP or whatever new telephone system they need because the system they have in place is very, very old. And that would be the next upgrade that they're probably going to need to do out there as well. So it's capable now. It's a matter of when they'll get the time and the money in order to move forward on it. And in order to broadcast to Rocky Knoll or the highway department or other facilities or the cell service that you mentioned earlier, being able to respond to someone in the marsh who may be lost. Where do we have our towers? Can you briefly touch on, you know, some of the locations so people have a better understanding of where these towers all are and what we're responsible for maintaining? Okay. There's five towers out in the county. I believe there's one in town of Holland. There's one out by the old county hospital building. There's one and more in the southern part of the county. And then we've got Taylor Hill right in the city of Shebaugin. There's one out at Rocky Knoll. And then we also have one off of 67 as well also. And you also have some equipment on top of Sunny Ridge, which of course we've now privatized, recently just sold the north building. But I understand an agreement's been worked out so we can keep some of our equipment there. Right. What's on the building? The number of buildings that we have are 11 of them. So there are remote buildings. And because of the cost of the telephones way back in the 80s, we just couldn't, we were able to come up with a better way of doing it to save the county. We went with wireless communication on our various buildings. And because the courthouse has the height, we can actually by line of sight, we can see the majority of buildings within the county. With the Taylor Hill towers and some of the other towning towers that we have, we can hit those towers also by line of sight. So rather than occurring a cost that we're going to have each month, we have radio and antennas out there similar to how we use the microwave system for law enforcement out there as well also.  What have you enjoyed most about your 35 years so far? I love the technology changes. I mean, if I didn't, I wouldn't be in it. But it's helping the people to get them to learn the new technology, to see things that we used to do differently in an older fashion and not be more productive in doing it and be able to communicate and give information to the public that we've never been able to distribute before or they had to come in, dig through books, be able to find that and now we can give it to them readily easily. So it's been tremendous. I like the automation field and it's been good. And dare I ask, but what if you like the least? When the system goes down and the calls start coming in, we said, we'd love to have one of these systems that would just take the call and we'll get back to you as soon as we can and just work on the problem. But you know, you take the call, we write it down, we have a help desk and then we try to get back to the users as soon as we can to tell them that they're back up and running and what the problem was. And sometimes if it's just, it might have been somebody that either had a power outage in that building and now the network came back up, but they came back, let's say, after lunch and they didn't even realize it at that point in time. So those are the easy ones to fix, but if you have some of the squirrels that get in our transceivers sometimes and some of that transformers out there, yeah, those are a little bit tougher to fix. Now, Joyce, we just dedicated the Marsh Tower. Was your group involved in the camera that's up on top that? We started with that originally as far as coming up with the idea of the camera up there and being able to rotate the 360, bring it back into the building. And then when we changed it back to the different funding source, then that changed over at that point in time. But I was out there for the dedication and I climbed the 144 steps. It was very good. It was good. I'm glad to see that that was accomplished. We're always looking to improve here and Mike, one of the things he's championed since he's been chair and is just working more cooperatively with the city where we can share services, consolidate. There's always talk of that, but you need leaders who really have the muscle to see it through and really want it to happen. And we've made some progress in that regard. Occasionally, you hear folks suggest, well, why can't the county information systems department and the city information systems department perhaps consolidate or share more? A lot of people, I think, don't realize that there is a lot of shared service between the two already. But what are your thoughts in that regard? As I say, we have been sharing a lot of information. We do have a fiber connection between the city and the county buildings. So we can access information. They have our tax information. They have our planning information. So we are sharing information back and forth. And in fact, we had a meeting yesterday over at the city on the opportunities now that the county has the city real property listing data. How do we get them the right data back on a timely basis and what do they really need? And so we had a various number of departments there so that we brought them all together so that we could find out what each of them needed there and so that they had the opportunity also to ask questions of us. We're going to be continuing to do some printing for them so that they're aware that there's a printing department so they don't have to upgrade some equipment. We talked about being able to not bury telephone numbers in there. And so there's icons out there as well also for them. Well, Joyce, thank you so much for joining us today. If you have questions of our information systems department, please don't hesitate to contact Joyce. As you can see, she's very friendly, very professional, and very knowledgeable and certainly she'd love to hear your questions or suggestions, particularly for our website. We've really worked hard to make that a valuable resource for the community. Joyce has been a big part of that and if you have suggestions for improvement, please again, don't hesitate to contact Joyce, Mike, or myself. So until next month, thank you for joining us. Speaking of next month, we're going to have another department head, one that you don't see very often and perhaps hope you never see. And that's our corner. County Corner will be here. He's getting some new office space at the courthouse, new yet old. And we'll talk about that more next month. So until then, on behalf of the County Board, Chairman Mike Van der Stien, thanks for joining us.