Hello and welcome, my name is Shannon Kamp and I'm the Chief Digital Manager of Data Diversity. We are proud to produce this healthcare special interest group for the Data Governors Professionals Organization. And we'd like to thank you for joining today's DGPO healthcare. First one of this event, just of this format anyway. Excuse me. Just a couple of points to get us started. Due to the large number of people that attend these sessions, he will be muted especially for the presentation portion of the presentation. However, for questions, we'll be collecting them by the Q&A section in the bottom right-hand corner. And to combine the previous format of the conference call with this new webinar format, if you raise your hand when we open up the Q&A, you will unmute individually and may unmute everyone at the end for an open discussion. Now let me turn the webinar over to DeVita to kick us off. DeVita, hello and welcome. Thank you, Shannon. I'd like to thank you and Data Diversity for giving us this platform. And I'd like to welcome everyone to our meeting today. Okay, before we turn this over to Ted, I just want to do a little bit of background about why this group is swarmed and what the plans are for the future. People are not in healthcare who are members are asking, why is there a healthcare dedicated group? If we look at membership, nearly 25% of our members are from healthcare and health related industries. So what is this group and who can participate? This is open to all members. There's no restrictions. If you are a consultant or if you are a vendor, as long as you are a DGPO member, you're more than welcome to participate. And this is formed as a special interest group, not a working group. And we differentiate that by this presently is more or less a discussion group where we share information into solid discussion on the issues that practitioners are addressing in data governance healthcare, as opposed to a working group where we're going to develop a work product. This may change in the future, but as we start up, we're starting out as a special interest group. The plans are right now that the meetings will be held every other month. We'd like to talk with you at the same time each month so you can more say the date on your calendar, which will be the third Wednesday at 3.30 p.m. eastern time. We'd like to try to get several people to volunteer to moderate so that all the pressure is not just on one person. We have backups. So if you are interested in being a moderator, please let me know, or Sal, who's going to talk in a couple of minutes. Now, the plans for the next meeting, which would be in February, would be a panel discussion. The subject of that would really be based on the panelists. So if you're interested in being a panelist, please email us. We'll have a call with the panelists, and then we'll determine what the... if we're just going to talk about their implementation or specific issues. Now, we are creating a dedicated member mailing list because we know people who may be of finance who are members may not want to get these emails. So everyone who's attending today will be on this list.  We're also going to plan for some sort of in-person meeting in June at the DGIQ conference, maybe a dinner, maybe a get-together. As the year progresses, we'll come up with something and get feedback from everybody. So there have been questions about relationships and sponsorships. We do not have a relationship nor do we sponsor or endorse any other healthcare special interest group. As I mentioned, we are not planning on developing any work products, but this may change in the future. Email and contact information and participants will not be open or shared. Now, what this group will not do and what we will not discuss. We need to be vendor-neutral, and that does not mean anti-vendor, but it means we cannot promote one vendor over another. So any tool recommendations and detailed discussion of tool functionality, we don't want to really get into that. But if you're presenting or discussing something, feel free to mention what tools that you use, but it really cannot be into that discussion. The same about the consultants who may have worked for you and who you liked and maybe who you didn't like. Okay. And this group is just going to be focused on the areas of data governance specific to healthcare, not just general data governance. Now, I'd like to turn this over to Sal, the Treasurer of the DGPO. Hi, everyone. Hope you're having a great Wednesday afternoon. As Davita said, my name is Sal Pasriolo and I am the Treasurer of the DGPO. Today, Ted Curran, Senior Director and CDO Officer for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Insurance Services Division will be leading a discussion on UPMC's data governance communication strategy. Ted leads the development, build out an implementation of data governance, information asset management, and business intelligence activities across UPMC's Insurance Services Division. He has very deep management accounting experience and managed the finances and business operations for the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon. He also serves as an expert advisor and consultant in business intelligence, development of dashboards, financial operations, and data governance to the higher education, healthcare, and government industries. With that, I'd like to turn it over to Ted to talk about the communication tools that are being leveraged at UPMC. Ted? Terrific. Thanks, Sal. Well, it's a pleasure to be here with all of you. I'm Ted Curran. As Sal mentioned, communication tools being leveraged in healthcare data governance is going to be the focus. I'm going to cover just a few slides just to kind of let you know some of my experiences and hopefully can share and collaborate because I'm still kind of learning and figuring these things out as well. UPMC is what they call an IDFS or Integrated Delivery Finance System. About $7 to $8 billion on the insurance side and $7 to $8 billion on the provider side. They oversee the data governance efforts where the insurance side and work very closely across that. And I'll get in some of the specifics as well. So for a number of us, we got together in San Diego at the DGIQ and then there was a call organized in September. Really around, was there enough interest? And there seemed to be a ton of interest in this. And my focus here is really going to be just following the process that we talked about, which is giving a brief presentation and hopefully having some good Q&A discussion and collaboration because I'm really looking forward to collaborating with so many of you kind of in the future. I've had a few calls with a number of folks that I've met since then and it's been a great way for us to network and share information. But obviously the goal here is to share knowledge and things across the area. And I'm glad that we have both a mix of consultants and also folks that are working within a series of healthcare companies. Again, as Sal mentioned, feel free to use the Q&A to put through questions and then hopefully we'll cover all those and we'll make sure that we can have some level of kind of more open discussion. I'm looking forward to it. I think in general, when you start getting into communication techniques, I think it's really important to kind of understand your situation. For me, in my situation, we're talking double digit growth program and market expansion. And a company which has over 65,000 employees, but on the insurance side, the side that's driving, again, about half the revenue, the payer side, it's only about 5,000 employees, which for those of you that are active in healthcare, it makes sense. You're going to have a lot more employees to drive a hospital system, doctors, nurses, all the different fantastic functions that we have there. But when I first moved to Pittsburgh to take a position in Carnegie Mellon, we had a couple hundred thousand people that were in the health plan and it was just small component. The health plan has over 3 million members. So you're in an area of extreme growth and I think that's really important. You think about how they've kind of pushed and leveraged existing systems and kind of how do you go about communicating effectively when people are kind of, you know, in this heavy growth mode. And you know, lots of seniors, people are being hired, new teams are being brought on. There's a significant amount of merger and acquisition. The need to tailor messages to different populations. I think this is really key because you're going to have certain messages that are going to kind of go out to really, really broad groups. There's certain messages that I've been putting out to people across UPMC, leveraging channels such as newsletters that kind of go out to all of UPMC. There's been some specific communications to senior leadership, to my advisory board, to your champions or data stewards, different parts of the UPMC organization. And then really even within the payer side have been kind of trying to lay out some individual distinctions or kind of working with specific groups. So you have your traditional payer, your health plan side, and you get into things like we have a very thriving center for research. We have business lines like pharmacy that often have some unique needs around these things and have some specific systems that may not be applicable to other areas. And I think that's been something that's taken me a little bit of knowledge to know, even though I've worked quite a bit in the industry. Access to tools quickly and simply in the 24-7 environment. This is no surprise to anybody. Qualitative and quantitative goals. Some areas have clear goals on revenue expenses, KPIs, marketing goals. A lot of other areas are looking for help and in some cases are really looking for me to collaborate with them on helping them with the value proposition.  I spend a lot of time helping them put numbers to things that are not financial. What's the value if we can, you know, focus on the brand if we can be more consistent. Then, you know, other things as well, if we can be more efficient and we can free up resources to do these things. And then, of course, methods consistency with our stakeholders. External parties, I mentioned regulators here, but also with vendors, with TPA arrangements. It's really an area too that I'm focusing quite a bit on our messaging and also kind of our overall policies. How do we make sure that we're supporting, not just who you would think of as your traditional stakeholders, but much broader group that's very important. So as we get into some of these communication tools, I do a monthly newsletter, and I have a fancy logo here that was created through marketing that's using the official UPNC colors. And I also blog weekly to biweekly. One of the real key things with that is you have to stay focused on it. The blogging is a lot of fun. The data governance cake, people used to joke, is it that free, cluster all free, but it's really been a nice way to tie into some really specific messages. And really, whether it's the newsletter on a monthly basis, which I have a very large audience, I think for an item that's had less than seven months of shelf life, I have over 500 users just on the insurance services division side. So just over 10% of the employees subscribe to the newsletter. But driving subscription engagement and then really focusing on current items. So a lot of times I talk about things, but as you'll notice here, even if you're for those of you that are kind of following along in the slides, I start tying in very specific things to them. So at UPMC Insurance Services Division, we're looking to streamline this, this, this, and this. You've told me in this case, when we were growing here, I found that we found these things. So really trying to personalize it to our business as opposed to kind of high level things about data governance. I try never to sweat the terms like data stewards and these things. I try to focus as little kind of focus on those things as possible as much on the substance and being available and making this as useful as possible. And then as I mentioned here, data tools such as data from tools like MailChimp. It's really important to me to understand who's opening it or groups doing it or is there specific things I need to be doing or certain groups opening other certain items much more regularly than others and making adjustments from there. As I go on here into the blogging, I don't think it's something that is natural for a lot of us that are doing data governance. You have to almost have a voice. When you look at some of the most successful bloggers, even at some of the data governance conferences, they have a tremendous voice. I know a number of the folks at these events are just excellent speakers. For me, it's been really establishing a voice that connects in the style. I wanted to highlight, and this might be consistent with what you've seen or not, but I really, really focus on collaboration and set expectations crystal clear what's up front and not and what isn't. I really want people participating. One of my biggest fears that I wanted to nip at the bud right from the start was certain things that may be inappropriate. If you think about social media in general, sometimes I'm afraid to put things on Facebook or in Twitter because of some of the, frankly, nasty stuff that comes back. It's not that I'm not thick-skinned, but I don't want folks shutting down. There's a number of topics where people have issues with other groups and other things that I've had to make it clear that things are important, but I don't want to be kind of having those things in a public forum. And I really wanted to make the forum as open and collaborative as possible to have people open and asking things and made it clear that there aren't stupid questions. There's a lot of things I can tell you on the medical side, the way I've worked in it, I'm a complete novice. I think if somebody like Len Silverstein was good old Zen with land about taking a breath instead of this nasty ground war speaking directly and having a misunderstanding, I've used some of his techniques on these things. But there's a lot of these things from different practitioners that I've been leveraging. So as I mentioned here, here's kind of two parts of examples where I put here on the piece about blogging, lots of data, but what about results often tied to an article I've read, and one case here was around through the MIT Sloan Review where they were talking about companies having more data than ever, but are we showing the value and really focusing on are we getting the value out of the different data types that we have. So I put here on another piece that I pasted. I start talking about very specific systems to our area, that we have a tendency to focus on what we know, an Oracle Report, an MC400, which is our claim system of Google Analytics chart. The systems themselves don't matter, but I know this one in particular caught a lot of things, because I made it clear to people that in my experience with senior management that a lot of the reports y'all are sending in, nobody cares about. That's not what they're looking at. And then we really need to actively listen to leaders and understand what is it that you need? What is it that would be most valuable? And I know that blog created a lot of interest, and a lot of people said, you know, I always wondered if people are really looking at these things. I really want to focus on the things that will help leadership kind of understand what's most important to our area, whether it's tied to claims or quality or other areas. And so I feel like I'm only scratching the surface in that area with blogging. Collaboration. I mentioned things like SharePoint, your internet, collaboration tools like Slack. I feel like, and obviously any tool, even Microsoft you have different tools, not just Slack, but things like Teams, but I just feel like we have scratched the surface on this area. And you might say, well, why? And I think it's just a huge opportunity to get info to people clearly. So you can see the size of my organization where we're not small. So to get information owners or data stewards of people to be able to send stuff to each other quickly, how is everybody using this field in our data warehouse? Integration of tools. In the case of Slack, we leverage things like Trello or Jira. We're doing more and more work around Agile, WordPress with Workflow, GitHub, Code Management. There's so many tools that you can put into these things. And what I also found, too, is the grouping in history. A number of folks have said, I couldn't remember something, but I remembered you put the committee charter out on our collaboration people. I was able to see the comments people made. It was all organized. And so for me, the people that are using it are getting a ton of value. So I need to figure out ways to make it really, really simple for people. A couple of people have had me have it, or have asked IT to have it start when they start their computer up in the mornings or putting these things on their tablets. And so this is an area where I've made progress, but it's an area where I feel like given the people that are using it, I'll admit, we have a number of millennials that just love this stuff. Some of them even get notifications through Facebook when things pop up. But I just think of all ages, we can, you know, myself included, we can be really connect, communicating more effectively across areas using some of these tools. And I think it's a critical area for collaboration for us and data governance. Being accessible, you know, I've spent a lot of time, and I don't know if this is a resonant for everybody and maybe we can talk about it, or people can type things in the Q&A area. But I have spent a ton of time helping people understand, you know, what data governance versus privacy, privacy protections controls. There's a lot more that we deal with in privacy besides just HIPAA, you know, the operational focus of data governance and all the different ways we support. And then the information security area, which for us is in the IT area and the establishing of technical administration and administrative controls to ensure that data is properly secured. There's no question that there's a lot of issues that kind of require an integration of our areas. And then broader compliance areas, like broad waste and abuse or quality control, et cetera. I've also found that it's been tremendously valuable to work with the teams and the trenches. I've spent a lot of time with the people handling the millions of claims, making sure people are supported but not under a microscope. A lot of folks add me to their messenger. We use messenger tools. They send things back and forth. I know I've had to use a little bit of caution. I'm finance Ted on Twitter. I'd love for y'all to follow me. I can follow you back. It looks like whenever I put this slide together, I have 2,579 users, which is not bad for a person that does finance and data all day. And I love when folks kind of send me private messages, but a couple of people have used the app finance Ted's handle and kind of gotten into something that's specific to UPMC, and I've just taken those things offline. I've had to spend a lot of time when I've sat with folks in the trenches listening and at times biting my tongue, where, gosh, I wouldn't have answered that if a customer was answering that way. But it really took a lot of their information that I saw in the trenches and put it into a training, which was a mix of video and voice. And what was fantastic with that was HR made up mandatory training for all of UPMC Insurance Services Division. So not only did everybody have to do it once a year as part of a back-to-school type of training, but now every new hire gets exposed to this. A lot like when probably all of us had to go to probably training if you're part of a health organization, you learn to wash your hands and the basic rules. For me, it's like data governance for washing your hands. And so just a great way of connecting kind of data management into the insurance services division. And you might say, why did they do that? Why did they allow that? Let's face it, data is a critical component of every one of our strategic priorities. And so I've made that case effectively, and in only being here a year in this position, you know, have things that are woven into the fabric and the culture of this place. Analyzing the impact of communications. I'm constantly setting what are the goals? What do we need to monitor in the format? How does the data impact decisions, change activities? How does it matter? You know, if I blog stuff, are people asking different questions? Are they communicating more? Are there certain topics that are resulting in higher interest? You know, as I mentioned before, things like third-party arrangement, acquisitions of growth. What kind of communications do we need to have for vendors? Spend quite a bit of time on other topics, you know, trying to make sure that we were focusing on specific needs, you know, that we're more forward-looking at tied-in goals. You know, okay, we just were doing budgeting. How do you make sure that data pieces are a part of that and how can I support you in those areas? But really putting numbers to things. You know, wow, I learned something from you. In fact, I'm doing some work internally and showing, you know, the processes within my own compliance area around how I'd like to see folks using Excel better and number of folks instead. If you can help solve this and make this more efficient, we have 10-plus people that are working on this, and I can give you a dollar amount that's tied to every hour we save. So that's me tying the impact of communications and then the work that we're doing. I hope that makes sense to everybody. And so we kind of start to wrap up here. I think there's a lot of focus on what's working and what may be useful, but I've been really careful on the fact that we don't want to wait for things to be perfect, but I don't pilot an experiment without getting people confused. I've tried to make sure that when I'm kind of pilot or checking something, I have a critical mass. And one of the reasons is that I've just found that people have a history, good, bad, and indifferent with IT areas, with compliance areas, and with data governance. And so I don't want to over-test things and say, oh, we're rolling out a new one, and then we're rolling out another one, we're rolling out another one. And so I've tried to at least make adjustments, and I've been willing to make changes to the options, make things more flexible. Heck, if we need to open up after this webinar, we're going to make it flexible. We'll have people click the little button to raise their hand, but if we need to open it up to get people talking, we will. But I haven't just blindly started throwing tools out there, and I think that's also helped as well, that people know that I'm not constantly slamming things out, and because they're getting things from everywhere. Think about how larger organizations are. I'm managing 28 information owners. I was hoping for it to be around 15 to 20, but 28 different areas that have very specific needs. Where we've mitigated risk, helping a unit. Where is it working? Making sure other areas are knowing it. I feel like a critical part of my job is, and obviously today we're not talking about policies, but communicating what's worked, what isn't working. We have a data set here. I'm really pushing on making sure that if it's appropriate that it should be being leveraged in another area. How can we maximize the value of some of these assets? And then removing these legacy products. I have a target of a number of legacy databases that I want to remove in partnership with the Project Management Office in the IT area. Can't get the communications right without marketing and internal communications. From them reviewing things that I'm about to publish, on newsletters, to logos, to them putting things into broader things that aren't data governance specific and tying these things in, to really connecting across the governance risk and compliance area to things that are being pushed out by IT and kind of cross-marketing things. Making it simple. I know I always tell people, my internet might look really simple, but they, boom, here's our content. Here's our forms. Here's our policies. Here's our procedures. Here are the questions people have asked, and keeping it current. You have to force yourself to keep it current. And so I hope this kind of got you going. I hope you can take two or three things out of here and you say, yeah, that was interesting or maybe we should try this. So we've been going here and gee, I've had a different scenario and you want to ask a question. So with that I was kind of thinking about what SIG members are looking to tackle in their communications and how can we better support each other. I really hope that it's an opportunity for us to, with this SIG, to really, really communicate. I know I am more than willing to answer questions and support any of you any way I can. And with that I'll turn it over to Sal to moderate any kind of Q&A that's come in and hopefully have some discussion here today. I hope that was useful. Sure, thank you. Ted, we have one question that came through from Michael Glassman and the question is, do you separate data and information governance? I've focused more of my time around explaining to people data governance and how it focuses into data management and the fact that I am responsible for both. I do have some things and some of the policies that describe the difference between information and data, but I've tried not to get too held in on kind of all the nuances. I know I've defined the people the fact that when I was hired that I am managing structured and unstructured data and the complexities.  So that was kind of an interesting blog discussion. So I have defined the differences but I try not to get too into the nuances and the differences. I think where I've had a little bit more of kind of, you know, people understanding who does what is I have a dotted line to so many different areas such as our analytics, you know, but I'm not in charge of analytics. But I am seen as a subject matter expert in analytics and I've helped heavily on things like managing the setup of server of a particular license and helping groups as they're migrating their stats, their data. It helps that I've done these things and helps that I understand code. I can't spend time coding and other things. The fact that I've done a lot of systems implementations and those specifics has been really useful. But I have tried not to get too bogged down into the nuances of those things. Really I think too in this healthcare environment I've just tried to keep it as simple as possible. And then the other part for me is obviously there's communications going on the provider side. The payer side is very different. But I've tried to make sure our things sync up really easy that the payer folks can come to one stop shop. But that if somebody comes to me with a provider question I'm not just passing them off. I make sure that they have folks on their side or I answer their questions but make sure I copy their areas. I try to make it as seamless as possible. I hope that answered. Great. Thanks, Ted. We have another question from Stephanie. And her question is, do you know what communications around DG had been in place at UPMC before you arrived? What were the most impactful communication plan elements that you introduced? Okay. Yeah, that's a great question. So before I arrived there was no chief conduit. There was kind of people by committee on the payer side of the insurance services division. It was all driven out of the provider side. I know one of the pieces that I thought was interesting was they sent out a physical pamphlet, a one pager on data governance, a physical piece of paper. And I got the sense that some of them arrived, some of them didn't. Some people liked having a physical piece of paper with kind of some contacts. Other people said they found themselves wanting to copy this piece of paper and paste it into a browser. So there's an example of something which I don't know. I'm not a big paper person, especially in an organization, but while some parts of my business have expanded into 38 states, the traditional provider side is very much concentrated and maybe it was easier. I think that's where things interoffice now. For me, the communications that have been most effective, I was stunned that already over 10% of the folks are subscribed and almost 75% are opening the newsletter. Just stunned at that, that people are taking the time to once a month go through it. And I think it's helped of having that voice and answering specific questions and hopefully giving them something quick that they can read, a page or two. I'm not writing novels. Another tool that's been really useful has been the training piece. Obviously it was required, but at the end of that, I put in a box that said basically it was an open box. They don't have to cover it, but it pops up when they're kind of grading the class that says, let me know an area that you... Is there an area that was really needed in the data governance area? And if you want to be contacted, put your information there. I mean, I've gotten some incredibly inappropriate things like my supervisor doesn't know anything about data, but I've gotten a lot of really thoughtful things around, you know, we really missed the mark. We've created too many access databases. Could you help us consolidate these things? Or, you know, we're excited that you're getting a data strategy. We have too many localized analyses that are being done. So those are some of the examples of things that have really worked effectively. Great. One more question just came in from Mark Stockwell. Given your finance background, have you established metrics to measure the business value of data governance initiatives and critical data access? Yeah, so the answer is yes, Mark. I mean, that's what I do. In fact, you know, when I was at Carnegie Mellon, besides putting dollars to data, I spent a lot of time putting returns on human capital, you know, the things that you don't see in your financial statements. And Mark spent so much great work in helping gather the interest of these areas, and I appreciate the format. Obviously, the challenge here is I was building it from scratch on the Insurance Services Division, but I have spent a ton of time, especially with the individualized plans and putting dollars to what's the value of these things. So I'll give you a very specific example, which is our growth of our Anywhere Connect platform, our telemedicine, putting very specific dollars to, you know, what our goals are. The hard dollars with the revenue pieces, but then some of the soft calls in and if we can learn this and we can grow it into other areas, and if we can capture specific audiences and targets around what are the value of capturing folks in, for example, Pennsylvania where we don't have locations and then outside of those areas, where the value of those specific areas. And so in a lot of those cases, sometimes I help them define the values and other times they've said, you know, for example, in a specific case around our brand, that if we can go up a couple notches on brand on this specific measure, it's worth X to us. And I said, okay, well then it sounds like we're willing to spend, you know, 10% of that, and if we could really actually move ourselves up the needle in this brand image piece, there's going to be some real value there, and it sounds like data is a part of that. And so I've spent a lot of time in that space, and I'm really only scratching the surface. I think in general I'm putting value a lot up to a lot of financial and non-financial pieces here, particularly when it comes to getting rid of assets. IT Group has said if you can get rid of what your plan is of these assets, it's worth X. And I'm hoping to crush it in the coming year. I really want to help groups get more streamlined and get rid of or archive these one-off databases that we've created a one-time basis. It's not exciting work. It's not glamorous, but I think there's just huge dollars there that I can easily quantify, because we're not keeping these things and storing them and saving them and people going through them. And it's just, as we all know in this business, you know, these assets, they start to proliferate. And the end-user computing, as I defined it in one of my blogs, is something that while at times it makes sense, but other times it's just excessive and it's created a... it makes you lose focus from a leadership perspective. It's diverted resources. And it's prevented us from focusing on the critical few. These are great questions. Mike, maybe we can all chat. I'd love to hear some other things, or maybe people can raise their hand or we can open things up more broadly about what they'd like to do. Go ahead. We have one... I'm sorry, we have one more question and then maybe we can open it up, but we have one more question. Does UPMC have a data governance structure on the healthcare side that your payer side collaborates with and are the groups integrated as one? Yeah, I thought I meant to cover that earlier. There is an eight-person dedicated team on the provider side. They're actually part of our enterprise analytics. I collaborate extensively with them. I'm on their committee, but we are two completely separate groups. And the rationale was that the payer side is just growing so fast, just like the provider side, but there's just very specific and unique needs. But one of the areas that we're collaborating most closely is around the IDFS concept. Where are we most comfortable working with our legal teams and other areas? Where are we most comfortable collaborating and sharing data across the IDFS, across the payer provider? Where do we need to maintain those separate areas? It's been a great opportunity for us. I have a small team. I only have 100% dedicated resource. I have open to FTEs. I have a dedicated person on the IT side. And then I have a number of indirect resources. I have two PM project manager resources assigned. I have two open written job descriptions. I have a number of folks in the IT area that are indirectly assigned. And then I have a firm that's kind of helping me from an advisory perspective. So I have a number of dollars on helping me bring in experts particularly tied to some of the things we want to do with implementing some of the tools. We're looking at implementing, for example, some more informatical tools where we had purchased them but really haven't leveraged the value of them. So obviously I can only do so much of my own and we're going to have a mix of internal and external implementation. Hope that answers. Ted, one other question. When you started out, did you go through a change management and communication strategy project, so to speak, that would actually look at, you know, what the culture at your organization is and what would work as far as communication vehicles? So I did. This is me coming from a consulting background. You know, having worked at the old Anderson consulting and yet having worked in the industry, I was trying to get the right balance of, you know, being new to the organization and not coming across yet another kind of know-it-all type of outsider and the fact that I'm rolling up my sleeves and doing these things with you. Also having coming directly from, you know, a very prestigious business school, I wanted to make sure people knew that, you know, I had the background, but I'd worked together. One of the real benefits is I report to a steering committee besides my direct boss is the chief risk and compliance officer. But coming in and having this kind of direct relationship to operations, IT, health economics and legal, they really connected me to the heads of every one of the businesses almost immediately. And so I started at Thanksgiving, which is kind of an odd time. I helped with some fires that were kind of year-end where I could really help on some compliance and risk items and things where data governance was kind of critically needed. But I really spent a lot of that time through Christmas and early into January on a bit of a listening tour and kind of listening and trying to figure out culture-wise as I get into the assessment phase and then report back, you know, what's going to resonate and what won't. I wish I would have spent more time understanding the things that really worked and didn't work because I feel like I've worked on something. I haven't leveraged some things that were wildly successful that I could have pushed on harder and some other things that people kind of had a bad experience with, per se. So, for example, people here aren't big on business glossaries. They felt like they spent a lot of time defining terms and people didn't maintain them and they didn't tie them to value. Yeah, when I tie them to, well, you could take this list and you could apply it right against the data warehouse and we could quickly manage some of the nuances and differences in date ranges and things across there. They say, huh, well, if we had those tools and I could use them, they'd be really valuable. So I think some of those things I kind of ran into, but I did really focus on the change management component and that piece. And some of that has been partnering with HR. We have a really good HR department here and I feel like at some companies, people focus so much on HR on the problems area and I really focus them on, you know, how are you trying to grow people from a business perspective and how can I, from a data perspective, support it? Hope that helps. Great. Well, I've gotten through all of the questions in the Q&A area. Do we want to maybe open it up for open discussion since I don't have anyone who's raised their hand yet? Yeah, I'd rather stop talking. I hope this was useful. I mean, I just threw together a few slides. I'd love to hear more from other folks on what was on their minds or what communication things are working for them or how we can support each other. Okay, just one thing. Please, prior to asking your question or speaking about your experience, can you just give us your name and your organization? And make sure you click the Unmute button. I've done that a couple of times on these WebExes where you make sure you unclick yourself and the thing next to you. Yeah, on the right. Well, actually, I'm about to unmute all, so that will enable everybody to talk. So just be prepared if you are not wanting to be heard to mute your own phone individually. So here we go. Everybody's about to be unmuted. Anyone would anyone like to share their experience around communication vehicles? So Ted, does Mark stack well? Can you hear me all right? Do I have myself on the mic? Yeah, I can. Okay, perfect. So I just wanted to say great presentation. I think it's one of those topics that we all struggle with is how to effectively communicate what we're doing with data governance out to an organization that oftentimes doesn't understand what the value is of governance and what role we play. So I thought it was very helpful. I did actually think your blogging idea is something that I think I'd like to try. I think it's a great way to get little bits of information out to the organization without having to craft something more formal like a newsletter, you know, content for an official newsletter or something of that effect. So once again, I just want to thank you for presenting your material and sharing your successes with us. Thank you, Mark. I appreciate it. I often too, when I write those, I try to think, if I'm the end user, what's the takeaways? Can I give them one or two takeaways that they'll say this was useful? And I try to make sure those are clear, either overtly stating it or just making sure that those key messages come through. And I think I've gotten better at it over time. I feel like at first I might have been too generic. I think you have to have a little bit of your own voice, your own personality come through. I think you can see that in professional bloggers and I'm by no means professional, but I appreciate you saying that. And I do hope you'll take advantage of it and reach out to me if you want to bounce off ideas because things are coming into me or people are saying different things around things. I'm saying, oh, I should blog about that. It might not be applicable to the hundreds of people in the newsletter, but I'm going to put this out in the blog. What tool are you using just out of curiosity to support that? The blogging? Yeah. Mailchimp. Oh, okay. I'm actually blogging with Mailchimp and it shoots out to people through a newsletter and then I have a blogging tool that's through our internet and my SharePoint and people make comments and do all those kinds of things. Awesome. Thank you. Apparently we're investing in some other tools that they want me to use at some point that made it clear that I don't want to keep switching tools on people, but I know there's a number of blogging tools that we're looking at internally. Anything else anyone wants to talk about in our first collaborative session after our first sessions of making sure there was enough interest in here? Was this useful? Does anyone have anything they like or they didn't like? Hi. This is Michael Glansman. I like the idea about blogging. My question is, I think it's a great idea because you can generate a lot of data governance leads and ideas instead of chasing some thirsty issues versus real issues. My question is, do you generate any feedback? Let's say somebody gave you something all over the blog. Do you create a feedback to that individual? Yes, we investigate. That's what we're doing, et cetera, et cetera. That's a great question. The answer is yes. Obviously I make sure we answer questions and I try to get different people that are maybe indirectly involved off of their perspectives. I lean on information owners or some of my direct people in IT and the PMO, which have been my closest folks to it. The other thing that I've done, I was a little disappointed at first. People were telling me the blog was really good, but I didn't think the numbers were high. A couple of departments asked me to help them with something. Then I said, do you mind if I blog on this? If I blog on it, can you kind of, and I hate to say this, but I forced their manager to have all of their people to make them read it. So I didn't police it, but they did. And that was a great way to kind of force content for managers to say, this is the subject I asked Ted to write about that's very specific to your area. So I kind of do the push and pull of blogging. I had them push them and kind of force them to the blog to read them. Now, I didn't necessarily, in a couple of cases, they asked me to confirm if, in fact, could I tell if people had read things or not. And I'm trying not to beat up on folks, but I found that that's been a really effective way, too, which is to focus on topics that were really specific there for me to say, yeah, I'd be happy to write. I'll write it for you guys. I'm going to put it in your blog. And if you don't mind, can you push your folks to read it? Because I think this is a really important topic, and this way you can get that level of consistency that we're all going in the same page. And in a couple of the cases, I ran and passed that first person in advance because I want to be sure what I was blogging about was really in lockstep with what they were trying to do. The blogging takes time. When you get into a weekly or bi-weekly cadence, it's amazing how fast it comes up. A couple of people were joking. They saw me banging away before my session at DG Winter. And the answer was, yeah, I'm blogging. I have content. I want to make sure it's in draft mode. I feel like I'm always either in draft or final mode for the blog or the newsletter. It takes time. Do you always hear from content to be fully engaged in blogging? So I've been 100% the writer of it. I've made it clear. I wrote it when I was on vacation. I read something about how people know when a blogger is not writing it themselves, they can tell, and that bloggers often lose their people when they're on vacation. So I read this about expert bloggers, and I just decided that for the time being, I'm going to write them. If other people get passionate about data governance and we want to expand it, maybe that's something I need to do. Obviously, in the collaboration tools like Slack, other people are putting things left and right. But I don't delegate down the blogging of the newsletter. That's my baby for the time being. Thank you. Ted, this is Radhika. I'm from the United Health Group. And I agree with what you said. It kind of sneaks up on you. I write newsletters every month. But then it's so quick that you are in the draft mode and you publish, and then you're again writing for the next one. I feel that after a while, you kind of have the same ideas or run out of ideas. How do you keep it going in a way that you engage your audience? How do you come up with new things? That's a great point. If there's a time that I don't have something, maybe I'll have to be honest and straight with people. I haven't had a shortage. I don't know. There's so much going on here. We just acquired HCMS, which is out in Wyoming. We've expanded Eastward with hospitals. I see my friend Patrick is on. We were chatting about just different things. Patrick does an amazing job over at Geisinger. One of the things that I do is I have on my devices and other things. Every time I think of an idea, I quick put it down. Something I see, something I saw, but I always keep a stable. I think I have my next... It's not necessary that it's going to be my next 10 topics, but I have it at any one time, 10 to 15 topics or so, things that in a pinch I would blog on or write a newsletter about. I may come up dry, but also one of the things that I've been doing is really personalizing things. Sometimes when it's not appropriate, I won't call out a specific thing. Or I'll say, gosh, we've been in this PID audit for close to two years. It makes me think about with data, the life cycle of our data, and I'll highlight another group. You guys know about our data retention policies and how they impact both paper and the online world. Some of my blogs really only had a sniff of data governance. They really highlighted in another area. I might do that in some of the blogs where I really am not feeling it that week. Maybe I'll just use it as a way to... Did you know about an IT area or another compliance area, and just only have a smither of data governance pieces. For the time being, I keep a rolling list. I keep a rolling list of stuff I want to talk about. Awesome. Thank you, Ted. I think the other part with the communication stuff is energy. A couple of people joked at DG Winter that I kind of get passionate about this stuff. In my case, it was agile. I feel like we don't talk about agile enough in data governance. I'm an agile, certified person. I've driven the finance products for a software component in it, and I came in and embraced the agile teams. I have a very specific role in agile tied to when we go to the sprint reviews, to supporting the scrum of scrums, to helping areas really flesh out the data needs more thoroughly from operationalizing, from project mode to operationalizing things in agile. Because of that, that's helped with topics, too. But, you know, I think, too, you got to kind of figure out your passion and your voice on these communications items. And so I've tried to be pumped about communications, even if I'm not feeling it that week or that month. We have about 10 minutes to go. Anything anyone wants to talk about? Maybe I can mute my line and either open it up to maybe Javita and Sal. You can talk about some things, or if anybody else wants to talk about stuff. This has been a lot of fun, but I'd love to hear from other folks besides myself. Thanks for the questions. They were great. Michael, I see your hand is raised. Did you have another question, or was that from earlier? Yeah, it's from earlier. I just wanted to make sure that, you know, I don't overlap with anybody else if anybody else wanted to start. I didn't want to interfere. No worries. Thank you. Yeah, so we really would love for this to be an interactive session. Does anybody else have anything that they might like to share about their experiences as far as communications are concerned? I mean, all these techniques that Ted has spoken to us about that have been leveraged at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Insurance Services Division are great. One of the things that I guess I'm interested in hearing is, did anyone find, you know, anything that definitely did not work for them as far as from a communications perspective or something that, you know, they would recommend folks to stay clear of? So question for you, Ted, and I'm sorry, I keep on going back to Ted, sorry about that, but you're the man of the hour right now.  Yeah, so the answer is yes. So in some areas I went to team meetings, whether it was all team meetings or breakouts of kind of teams or groups, so I've been happy to attend those things, whether it was to kind of talk about kind of the overall program, how things are going. In a couple cases I shared with them after I got the approval what I had shared with the president's division on kind of our overall assessment. I shared some of the goals of data governance for us as a whole and how I can maybe, I'd like to help them set their specific goals. So that's been a way and they've said how they wanted to be communicated and that they've said, we'd like you to come out to this meeting or this specific area. In a couple areas they've asked me if I could be a voice or a part on some of their projects. So, you know, I always have to be careful to make sure people know I'm the second line of defense. You guys own the data, you know, I'm one person, I have another person, I have these resources in 19 other areas but we're very focused on building a program. That's where having access to a firm like InfoTech has been useful. I've tied them into those areas. A couple people have loved being able to search through the resources on a site, you know, or Gartner or one of these other things and being able to get these things and then reach out to me if they have questions on it. So that's been one way of communicating and giving them access to some other tools that they could kind of search on. When it came to a project, I was specifically asked to help. They were really concerned about the data testing and they said, you know, we would have liked to have brought you in earlier but this is a piece that go live and on one of our lessons learned we feel like we didn't test this very specific area. We'd like your advice on how to attack this. So, you know, I kind of became the consultant again, you know, where I put my consulting hat on it. And what was nice about that was I was integrating with my broader governance risk and compliance. It was actually somebody I didn't know in my own group who was saying, hey, look, I'm going to be doing a quality review in this area anyway.  Let's make sure that you're comfortable with those areas. So that was a good way, too, to work with the most part of our area. And it was also kind of working in advance of any kind of audit or other kinds of work on a system that had been live for less than two years. So those are some examples of how they've asked me to communicate with their folks. Sometimes it was coming out of their meeting. Sometimes it was, can I... And then I also, you know, another tool that I've done that this was a really interesting one on my blog, I have little buttons that say, you know, share my newsletter. You can forward it to another colleague. I ask that certain things that they keep internally, but it's really easy for them to forward and share things. And I encourage them to do so in their groups. Hi. We have a minute left. Four minutes to go. Yep. Yep. Go ahead. Good. I'm sorry. Go ahead. This is Patrick. Ted, thank you. Great to hear from you again, and thank you for the shout-out. Ted and I both work at health systems in the state of Pennsylvania. I'm at Geisinger. One thing I wanted to mention very briefly is the concept of a business vocabulary, which is one of the things that we can use a business glossary. Now, to talk about business vocabulary and using a business glossary to support the discipline of business vocabulary in communications could potentially be more of an information governance rate. I don't know how we want to slice that. But if you're using a term in your blog or other email communication and you have a glossary tool which allows you to, say, embed hyperlinks directly to term definitions, that's an approach that I've used with emails. I don't have a blog. And emails, when I use a term, that maybe not everybody knows the definition of, but we've already coded a definition for that term into our business glossary will provide a URL directly to that so everyone can understand the common and accepted usage of the term. So I wanted to throw that out there. Man, I love it. You're right, Patrick. That's a great one. I said in Patrick Geese gave a fantastic presentation for a vendor around how he was using some of the tools. And I think he's just ahead of me when it comes to some of the business vocabulary and business glossary kind of adoption. That's a great idea. I didn't even think of that, that I could just tie those right in since these things become integrated and it'll take them right into it without them knowing. What a great idea. I'm running it down as we speak. Okay, great. We have four minutes left.  I have another question for Ted. This is my question again. Ted, in your experience, what type of communication or information is not very effective or appropriate for BLOG as far as data governance is concerned? So I was looking at some of the communications that were existing in the health system, so whether it was on the provider side or the payer side. And I'll be honest, some of these folks are assessed out and some, you know, there's so many, I think we're so regulated, I think we're like number two compared to banking, so I have not beaten the head over them over the head with, you know, according to Medicare section six, you know, level eight. I've tried to stay out of those kinds of things. That's been an area that I just don't feel has been as successful. I've tried not to over delve them into kind of the nitty gritties of excessive compliance. Obviously, I'm a compliance area, but you know, too many ties as per policy in these things and really try to keep it conversational. I've just, I've read too many communications that are too long and that read too much like somebody's copying and pasting. I try not to copy and paste, period. There's times I get other ideas from things and I quote and I highlight them, but I try to force myself not to copy and paste because we all have the Internet. So I try to, with these communications, what am I writing about this that makes it worth writing. And for me, that is taking something I might have read about or might have been thinking about or might have saw and tying it specific to this business. Things that somebody has already written and thrown really well because what's the point? I can just put a link to it on my Internet. So I usually take something that's been on my mind or that people have been talking about and write about it with a specific tie to this business, to our business. Where are you? That's great. With that, we're at the top of the hour here. I just wanted to thank everyone for joining us today on this dig. Please mute yourself for ever talking. I wanted to thank everyone for joining us here on this dig and we looked a whole way, something about that you didn't know before and thank you very much and look forward to see you next time. Yeah, I'm looking forward to the panel. Thanks for everyone coming on. I appreciate the questions. This has been fun. I hope it was useful. Take care.


You know, one of the differences, one of the interesting differences this article points out, which I think is maybe not a difference anymore. One of the big differences is that when people looked at America and the UK, one of the differences was that the British laborers always resisted change, always resisted automation, always fought it. The Luddites were very popular in Britain. And one of the things that made America unique, one of the things that made America special was the fact that Americans embraced innovation and embraced changed and and and and cheered on the trend towards automation and, you know, relatively speaking, I'm sure there was resistance or some Luddites here, but relative to the UK, it was a small number and and this this makes me sad, right, because that's not what you think today. It's it's what you're seeing the opposite, right. You know, people like Karl Marx played off of this automation and played off of what they claimed was this was all going to create this alienation where they they they claim that all this automation, but factory jobs as well, was going to create this angst this existential angst among people. And you see the same argument being made today. So this is the spiritual crisis capitalism was going to create, because, you know, machines are going to take your jobs and you're going to feel alienated because what are you going to do now that the machine is taking your job.  And it's fascinating, because I was reading this article in Atlantic magazine. I guess it's an article that was written when was this in December after Donald Trump was elected and analyzing kind of the frustration of the people who voted for Donald Trump. And it's exactly the same language. It's the, it's this, you know, American workers have no have no source of meaning they're losing their jobs. They can't get self esteem. Now there's a complication here, which is that over the last few decades we have demonized and made. What would you say made it, you know, unsexy and uncool to have a manual job so everybody needs to be, you know, some kind of program or intellectual in order to deserve self esteem from the work that they do. That's kind of the leftist I think to a large extent responsible for that kind of attitude. They've, you know, they look down on manual labor they do down on people struggling to make a living. Even though they claim to be, you know, the left always claims to be the friend of the working class they've actually become the enemy of the working class that's part of what I think the Trump phenomena or the election of Trump represents. It represents the fact that many Democrats felt that the many Democrats felt the Democratic Party had betrayed them. Many Democrats felt that the Democratic Party had become elitist had become a party that didn't understand working people didn't respect working people didn't care about working people. And I think that's right. I think I think and this is the this is the whole attack on the elites attack on the elites. The elites don't care about working class people who actually work for a living and there's a whole. There's an article in the Atlantic, the spiritual crisis of modern economy that deals with all this stuff and you know about how how alienated people are they're losing their jobs machines are taking over. And what are they going to do and they can't think of what they could do and they're unemployed or they're underemployed or they're partially employed. And they're just frustrated by the world and it's machines and it's Chinese. And they know jobs in their little community and they can't think of what else they could do or they just don't think. And this is the big spiritual crisis. And as I was reading this and I was thinking, oh my God, this is exactly what Mark says in the mid 19th century. This is exactly what kind of existentialists said in the middle of the 20th century. This is the same same same old story of capitalism creating alienation and creating people destroying self esteem and the spirituality and all this garbage. And and yeah, it's all true.  If you refuse to do what is necessary for a human being in order to survive.  And it used to be said and people understood that what was necessary to survive was to use their mind to use their reason to think, to innovate, to be entrepreneurial at whatever level you can do it. At whatever level you can imagine.  There's a, you know, we have now instituted into our American psyche. And I find it hard to believe that I'm saying this about America into American psyche and intellectual laziness and entitlement a demand not to have to move anywhere. Not to have to retrain at all. Not to have to rethink what we do in our life and to have the same job for 50 years and be able to retire on nice benefits and live well forever.  So if you don't want to be ambitious, if you don't want to retrain, if you don't want to reskill, we are not going to penalizing you. We're not going to penalize you for all that.   And where does that money come from? Well, it comes from those who are ambitious, those who are innovative, those who are going to create and build something. We're going to take money from them and provide it for you because our expectations of you have now come down to the point where we don't expect you to be able to find another job. We don't expect you to be able to retrain yourself.  We don't expect you to innovate, to do anything, to figure out what people want or to figure out something they don't know that they want and provide it to them. Lack of imagination, but also lack of expectation from human beings.  All right, so none of this is new. Not the threat of the robotics taking people's jobs. Not people's response to it. Not the intellectuals response. If you go back to the intellectuals back then, you know, even some of the industrialists themselves who were panicking and were worried about what they were doing. And just like today, you've got the Elon Musk's of the world and other entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley advocating strongly for universal basic income because they're convinced that they are destroying jobs for people. And that what they are doing, what they're doing, you know, is bad for people somehow and that they need to adopt universal income because otherwise people will really not have jobs. So it really is nothing new under the sun when it comes to the robotics discussion to the robotics debate. It's the same arguments that have always been made. And, you know, I strongly believe that those arguments are going to fail again. And why are they going to fail? They're going to fail because there's no limit to human needs and human wants. You know, there's no limit to human imagination. There's no limit to the kind of things we can do with our minds. There's no limit to the kind of places we can go. You know, imagine the day where we have an entire tourism industry built on going into space. And they could be thousands and thousands of people employed in such an industry. There's no limit to progress. There's no limit to wealth. There's no limit to what can be produced and created. Now, the only limit that there is is my imagination. I can't imagine all the wonderful things that are going to happen. Because, you know, I don't have a good enough imagination for it. But it's just a limit of the human mind, a limit of imagination. Now, there could be a limit. And that limit could be just if we impose by force, if we restrict people's imagination, if we restrict people's use of their own reason, if we restrict people's ability to think, then yes, then we're going to get a sliding back into a dark ages. But as long as people are allowed to think, as long as people are left alone to think, and as long as people can create, can imagine, can produce, then there will be new jobs, there will be new things that we desire. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual, would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning, any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect. Not by feelings, wishes, wins or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist broods.


Hello, hello and welcome to this talk. It's called the open source automation struggle between comfort, openness and usability. I will have a first, I will have a few question on you. Does any of you have been in my talk last day of going first? Nobody? Amazing. Do you, are you familiar with Home Assistant? What's up, what's up? Amazing. Have you ever heard about ESPIO? Have you ever heard about ESP Home? Amazing, amazing. So let's start. Thank you very much for coming. So who am I? My name is Tomasz. I'm the bold bearded but barbarian from the east. I came from Slovakia and I moved to Czech Republic about 15 years ago. I considered myself a software engineering grease monkey. What does it mean? I worked as a software developer for about 15 years. Now I do operations, system administrations and software development on the side. And my motto, somebody gave me a sticker on these years for them. And the sticker said, I can ride my own zero days. Thank you very much. So this became my motto. I live by it. I can ride my own zero days. And I did it on numerous occasions. So what's the motivation doing this talk and what's the motivation even like doing home automation and smart homes the open source way? So the biggest is privacy. We all know, as I talked about the struggle, we all would like to have those devices that you just connect to the home and they work and they are safe. They do not steal your data. They are not spying at you. And the software engineers did a good job. I'm not sure how many of you are software engineers. I am and I don't trust software engineers because I make mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes. So I pinpoint one thing. This is a picture coming from a relatively recent paper which is from German and Netherlands universities and the cooperation, those two universities, Max Planck Institute and some other from Holland. I'm sorry, I don't remember the name. So what they did is the day tried by bunch of those smart connected devices and connected into the network with IPv6. You know that amazing new technology. It was invented in the year 1998, right? And nowadays, still only 30% of requests to Google are over IPv6. This is a great example.  Most of those devices have implemented the standard from the year 1998, meaning they were able, they created something which is called Extended Unify, a unique identifier, which means that in the first implementation of IPv6, your MAC address was part of that address. So you buy your TV from a renowned company and you can use your internet and then you realize there is your MAC address. There is your other space. Huh, what happens? You can be tracked. You can be tracked. Amazing new technology. Nobody did anything wrong. They just forgot to read the documentation, which was released in year 2000. Just to check, it's a typo. If you're tracking ID, it doesn't match the phone call of the laptop. So, you mean here? Yes, sir, the laptop. Yes, because the laptop uses privacy extensions for IPv6. So it has randomized the part of the MAC address, but you still have on your network that one device which is identifiable. So, hey, it's the same network. It's the same guy. This TV, his computer, and here goes the advertisement, right? So this is just one of those examples. It's a really nice one because it's a relatively new one. The others, you may have read the news. Amazon got fined $30 million for privacy violations of ring cameras. And there is much more. Every year, and we will see much more every year. So that's why. I started this project about five years ago when I bought my house and decided to make it connected to everything. So this is how I started. They started with simple home assistant installation with the PostgreSQL as database and ESP home as building block for all those sensors and cameras and all connected stuff that I have. This is where I have moved. This is three years later. So it's about 30 environmental sensors, about 20% bunch of cameras. And I have added it. I have removed some stuff from the stack. I no longer use Postgres and I have added a new framework which is called Tosmota. I'm not sure how familiar are you with it. I will get back to why a little bit later. And this is basically where I got or regarding the connected devices that I have at my home. All of them except six are handmade by me, others I bought and flushed with open source software. So how did I get here? So from one Raspberry Pi, which I experimented with, to cosplaying as a sysadmin. So now I'm running two firewalls, two storage nodes, the virtualization nodes too. Everything on the double because I want to be sure that my house is always connected. And I can rely on me flipping the switch and the pump going on. Or the most important, more important thing when I flip the switch, it goes off. So I moved slowly but surely from Raspberry Pi. This is the Raspberry Pi 4, but I started with two, which was 32-bit ARM. I'm not sure how familiar are you, but 32-bit ARM was a mess. So I tried a number of boards. The performance was not there. It's fine if you are experimenting with it when you have small networks with dozen of devices. It works perfectly, nothing to fear of. But the moment I started to grow, I realized that, okay, what do I do? Let's try a new hardware. So I tried one of the first 64-bit ARM boards, which is NVIDIA Jetson TX-1, which was widely available. And around the home assistant, that suffices for some time, but then you hit the bottleneck as with the most ARM board. At that time, which was storage. It only had one set-up board, which is slow. So that's six-bit, it's very slow storage nowadays. So I moved to standard hardware, like PCs, X8664 machines, nothing fancy, just the consumer grade hardware, which I bought from the shop, put it together, deployed stuff. And over the time, my wife started complaining because you can see there are three nodes. There was another three nodes just lying on the ground around the house. So I decided to optimize and start playing as a seasoned man, so I bought my first drag, built everything in it, and it didn't work. So after a bunch of debugging and redeployment and understanding all the underlying technologies, I choose to use Trunas as my storage server, which is a really nice open source project. The scale offering from them is based on Linux, so no BSD needed. It does the replications, it does all the magic for you, and you don't have to do a thing. Podman, for running some of the infrastructure related things like databases, they do influx DB now, so running influx, running some pipeline for image recognition, that's where you can see a bunch of graphics cards there. To be honest, I have to admit, the picture is from the times when I was mining, but I still have the hardware, so why not to run something useful on it, right? So I started to play with different things. So let's get to what I started using compared to my previous solutions. In the first talk at DevConf like three years ago, I presented different set of sensors that I was using, but over the time, somebody pointed out some other sensors like the MH1, which is CO2 sensor, which is basically a replacement unit for some AC something, but you can buy it relatively cheaply, it's a relatively good CO2 sensor. Then there are a couple of Bosch sensors, which is environmental sensor and sensor for illumination, so I can tell if there is enough light in my rooms, and if I need to turn the lights automatically on, and the presence detector, which is basically a microwave radar. It uses reflection as a means of identifying movement in its surroundings. I am really surprised how precise this sensor can be. If you have the right board behind it and the right piece of software, you can make it tens of millimeters precise, which is nice, and that will be it regarding sensors. The other thing that you need, if you are, I need it, I want it to work with our displays. Sometimes you just need some information. You need to quickly see, for example, the pump is half of its cycle, and I don't use smartphones, so I don't carry phone around my home. I don't always have a notebook with me, so having nice randomly placed displays that will show you some information can be really useful. I'll just pinpoint a couple of them which are really nicely supported in the ESP home platform, and those are the two small OLED displays. They are amazing, colorful, really nice, and really easy to work with. Then there is a two of TFT displays, which are LCDs, which are LCDs, one of them you can buy as a separate module, or maybe both of them, but the seven segment one is used in some devices such as this one, which is power metering device, and they are nice. They are colorful, but they are small, and they don't have really high DPI. This is 240 on 180, I think, or something like that. So a really small number of pixels. And then I saw on the internet there's this nice IPS display that you can buy. Seven inches cost about 35 euros, and it can do high DPI, so I bought it. And then I realized you need Windows to write the UI. And I was surprised here. My experiments with the Mexican displays end up because I don't run Windows. I don't run close source applications. I have no way how to put the UI on there, but it's running ARM M3 Cortex, so there is something over there. I was able to get a serial console on it, but I wasn't able to flush it. My embedded knowledge is really limited. Even when I'm standing here talking to you, I do not know that much about embedded systems, but I know something. So don't be afraid of MCUs. This, I choose this platform as something to show you. I haven't had to do a bit of soldering to build these two things. Don't be afraid of it. You can just buy it. This is a platform from Chinese company that you can stack together in standardized connectors. You can just put it all together, write your own code, flush it on there, and play with it. It doesn't hurt, and it's really simple. The ESP home that I was mentioning is basically declarative framework, which allows you to write code without writing code. So you need your YAML files, and they will generate the code for you and create all of those bindings that you need to the libraries that you are using, or load all the drivers that you require. So they don't bite. And another thing that I have added to my smart home or connected home is a power metering. So these are those products that I don't build because working with mains power and switching mains power can be really dangerous. You can see, nice example of the danger here. It's not my picture. It just took from the internet, but I used the same box. This was error of the user. He connected wrong inputs, but I have seen similarly burnout box, one of mines, when I used this device, which is the dual R3 from company called Sonoff, and they guarantee you 2,000 watts of resistive load. So I connected 2,000 watts of induction load to see what happens. Who would expect that it burned, burned, really nicely. So this is really interesting bunch of products from the company called Sonoff, as you can see here. So what do they do? This is a line they call, do it yourself. So there is a serial console. Not sure if you can see it, probably not. There is always a serial console somewhere there. All of those boards have it. It's under the hood. Either they have just soldering pads, or they directly give you the serial console. And as we know, where is the serial console by the way? So you can basically flash whatever you want there. I will mention all of those devices. So these two up here, basically the one on the right is an older revision that the company already stopped selling. I believe it's because of the circuitry they used, and basically it wasn't very well built for the purpose that it was supposed to do. They, it's about five months. They created absolutely new version, which is called Power Free, Power Free, which is the biggest box here. And this is really interesting because they listen to us, they listen to people who use their products, and they created box which is able to switch five kilowatts of induction load, which is amazing. So what I did, that's right. And it works. I connected my three and a half kilowatt induction load on it, and now it's switching, I think it's 3,500 cycle. I just automatically switch it every day a couple of times to see how long it will survive. I will definitely update my page once it dies, because I'm looking forward to see if they have learned something. Because one of those, the Power Air 2, used a really cheap relays. And after I did this test with them with just about a couple of hundred watts, after three, five thousand cycles, somewhere around there, most of the relays get stuck.  So pumps and things like that, you want to have reliable relays and reliable switches. So these parametering devices, the newest one is probably the best design also because it uses CT clamp. So you can see that the measuring interface is basically outside of that circuit, which is not true in all of the other solutions by them. In all other solutions, it's directly on the board. There is some resistor, which is used for measurement of the voltage and measurement of the current, but that can lead to fires. Doing it this way, doesn't matter what you will put through there. If the cable does not melt, you should be okay. And I just mentioned three of the sensors that are used there for those of you who are interested. They are basically one-purpose things to measure current differences and voltage differences. Go figure how and why they use those three. The last one is probably the most precise one. Those two are probably the cheapest ones. So that's about the parametering. So let's talk about how we connect those devices. So I never had any reason to do anything else, the 2.4 gigahertz wifi, because it was too expensive. I didn't see any reason for it. But a couple of years ago, there's this shop called Lidl here in Europe, where you could get one of those boxes, which is basically a base station for Zigbee with some RTL, some Realtek MIPS SOC, and some Zigbee SOC. And so, me being me, bought it for, I think, 15 euros or something like that. I opened it, which you don't find. There's a serial console in there. So I tried, I played with it a little bit, poked around it, but as I mentioned, I'm not that good with embedded systems. And there was already somebody smarter than me, named Paul Banks, I think, who already did flesh it. So I looked at his work, basically followed it, copied it, changed the configurations a little bit, sued my needs, and fleshed it back with Alpine Linux, running my software, not contacting Chinese government, data centers, and just talking to my stuff. But this device, and I bet it on the SOC, is not reliable. The network I created using this base station was clustering all the time if I connected more than 15, 20 devices. So they decided to switch, something different, so that this USB dongle, just again, from the same company as the parametering devices, and again, they put serial console over there, so you can flesh it with whatever you want. And it's Texas Instruments Radio, based on similar chips, but it's stable. Again, the price is around 20, 25 euros. I have deployed three of those devices, and network of 65 ZigBee clients, but I wasn't unable to make it work for longer than 20 minutes. Every time I try to create bigger ZigBee networks at my home, they get clustered. They always get clustered, and I don't know what to do. I don't really use ZigBee that much, I just wanted to test it, so I sold most of the stuff, and left just a couple of light bulbs, and that's it. For the other radios that I use, it's Bluetooth, so I'm not sure if you're familiar, this is PineWatch, this is BengalJS, those are open hardware smartwatches that you can buy. You can flesh whatever you want on them. They have Bluetooth LE, so they transmit a lot of information over the Bluetooth LE. You can get through it. I use it for presence detection. So if I want to know where the people are in the house, actually, exactly me and my wife, so where do we are, where do lights need to be on, when they can be turned off, but. There is no direct integration for Home Assistant, so I had to use some other means. One of them was Room Assistant. This was a really nice project I found out a couple of years ago. It's basically really, really, really, really, really simplified Home Assistant, which should be working on the level of rooms, but it has moved to be an abandoned where. What it does, it's basically, for me, it was Bluetooth to MQTT gateway, which basically just transmitted the messages from the watchies to the Home Assistant, and then I could kick in the automations and do the Home Assistant stuff there. There is a huge amount of implementation of Bluetooth to MQTT. Why? Most of them are just basically shell script, Python script around Bluetooth CTL. We just paste the commands and work with that. The difference is probably the open MQTT gateway, which is a project that has a number of integrations and it does support a number of protocols. So you can use Bluetooth, Lora, whatever you want. I have more or less dumped all of those solutions and I basically use the watchies Home Assistant with its beacons and that's it. Another part of the setup are new cameras. So probably the most prevalent that I have at home is ESP-CAM. It's basically ESP32 chip with camera on it. I built a couple of housings for them. You can see there is an AC power. There is the camera. I prefer when I put some mains powered things, I prefer to use these kind of boxes. This is electrical installation box. Why? I prefer to use them. They do not burn. So even if you try to put them on fire, they will not burn, which is amazing. But soon I realized that ESP-CAMs have huge disadvantage and that is the CCD chip that's on there. It is two, three, five megapixels, depends on which version you have, but for my use cases, which I will show you in a moment, it was not enough. So I played with Raspberry Pi, that's better, but still, if you want to take a picture of something which is more than two or three meters away, the basic Raspberry Pi camera is not really useful because you know there is a person, but that's it, nothing more. The great thing about it, about using Raspberry Pi, is the platform. You get Raspberry Pi, this is the mini, or how is it called, which is really nice, small single core with 500 megabytes of RAM. You can put Linux on there. It is nice. There is another thing that happened some time ago, again from the Pine64 company, which is the PineCube. This is basically Linux-based camera. So what they try to do is that they created a board. Problem for me, again, is the CCD. It might be enough for indoor usage, but for me, it wasn't good enough. And then we get the last thing, which is just something called IP webcam. And this is the logo of the application. You can find it on fdroid. If you don't mind your privacy, you can find it on Google Play as well. And it's basically an application that gives you beautiful interface to a camera system. You can have multiple renders. You can hook it into whatever you want. You can hook it into the automations in Home Assistant. You can hook it into different NVRs. You can do whatever you want with it, and you can reuse any old phone, which is nice. And phones have really nice cameras. So here you can see the difference. Well, this is why I mentioned that ESP cameras are not enough. The one with the blue car, it's made by smartphone. The one with the red car, it's made just by the ESP cam. And you can see that the picture is not so much clear. Maybe you have noticed there's a bunch of squares there. So there's a yellow square. I'm not sure if you can read it, but it says car there and then a percentage. How sure it is that it is a car? How sure it is that it is a car? And usually it's more than 60, so it works. As it goes for the software, I used Motion Project. It's a demon for Linux that allows you to use any camera input and detect a movement on it and take the still pictures, create a video. There is another project called Motion Eye Project, which basically encapsulates the demon into the web UI. For a while, there were releasing Motion iOS, which was basically an image that you could flash on a number of ARM-based boards and it contained minimal Linux system and the UI. So you could just then hook it into the NVR that you already have or use it as an NVR. And those boxes that you can see are created by this amazing project called Dudes 2. I forget what the acronym stands for, but it's the second version. There was one couple of years ago. It's a really nice open source project because it provides you a REST API for object identification.   But then you realize that mining Ethereum is one thing. But when you want to process the images, you don't necessarily need a kilowatt of power to consume just to process a bunch of images, right? So I moved from experiments with graphics cards to just plain CPU work, which costs less. So the other important thing about having connected things is the way it notifies you. So this is a bunch of connected light bulbs.  When you ping me on IRC in our federal channels, this is what happens at my house. So I start getting notifications because I work from home. Similarly, something similar starts happening in my office. If our composites fails consequently in two days, it will start really, really blinking. And the other thing that I built, it's the wall thingy.  It's basically the e-vase they found around the house and put it all together on one piece of board.  One of them is currently off.  You see, this is the Home Assistant dashboard that I use. This is my driveway so you can see when the check post arrives because they don't wait. And that's it. And that's basically it about the talk. So do you have any questions? Why do I need 15 cameras? So you can't see it, but there is a road here. And I want to have them on the photos. So that's why. I basically monitor only outside of my house. No cameras are pointing inward because I don't trust software engineers, so I don't trust myself. And only the cameras are only on outside. I want to keep track, but keep track about the life that's there because I live at the end of the village. So I track the birds that are flying there. I track the animals that are there and things like that. And those funny photos of your cats and dogs and stuff that you can get of the PanCube. Not really. I always just powered it from a really cheap power supply, something like I have here on the camera. This is really small, 700 milliampers, I think, or something like that, and it booted. So I'm not sure about the exact power consumption. You have to ask my wife. She is the marketing department. Are there any other questions? But BT Home? Sorry? Are you aware of BT Home, the new standard for low-energy messaging and like charging presence and all that? No, not really. Not really. Can you please repeat? BT Home. BT Home? I'll look into it, thank you. Any other notes? I'm open to anything. If I was wrong, I'm not correct, so just tell me. If that's it, thank you very much, yeah. Do you use some kind of scenarios in your home, like when I enter to a light on, then coming out from home to a light on, or don't? So not really regarding the house itself, but for example, my office, where the wall thing is. So now it's turned off, because I'm not at home. So yes, then some small portions of it, like for example, especially my office is probably the most automated part of the house, and then the garden, because there's a lot of work there. So yeah, if I walked out of the office, and it's after 8 PM, means I'm not longer at work, everything shuts down, and then in the morning, usually I wake up, the home assistant realized that my watches have moved to the kitchen, so I'm making a coffee and everything turns on, computer boots. The question is, how far, how to support with scenarios? If you decide to use this kind of do-it-yourself hardware, like those switches I have noticed, things like this, it's extremely easy. It's extremely easy, because you just need to identify, let's say, person, you, then you need those relays to switch the things. There you are. And home assistant is declarative, so is YAML. So we will declare in the YAML file how it should act, similarly to automation and Ansible, and it will do the things. OK, thank you very much.