00:00:05

Very quickly, just a, a brief introduction. The Beyond Budgeting Roundtable has been around for quite a while. We were founded at the end of 97, beginning of 98 over in the uk. Unlike a lot of academic theories and movements and so forth, beyond budgeting came not from professors, it came from practitioners observing what was happening in the world. And what really got us excited as we looked for better ways to plan and control is that we found some companies that were so good at budgeting, they did not do it at all. And we said, well, how in the world do they do that? You know? 'cause if you come from the financial world, how many people in the room are from finance? I see you at the back, back there. Good. Nobody can sneak in behind you that way. <laugh>. I told Naveen as we came to this conference, I'm a little bit nervous, Naveen, she said, why, Steve, you're not nervous about anything.

00:00:54

I said, well, there's 1800 people and there aren't hardly any finance people at all. They're all mad at finance. Okay, well the, I will tell you that what the round table found is that many of the same things you observed as this, this movement has, has come together. Finance is seeing as well, except in finance, we do some really dumb stuff. I tell a lot of our audiences, if finance would just stop doing dumb stuff, we'd have a chance to start doing some smart things. See, we take, and we, you know, you, you put together a plan for a system in the old way, right? Well, we put together a plan for a year and we negotiated back and forth throughout the whole organization. We argue about it a long time, but it gets formally approved and published and the board signs off on it.

00:01:38

And that in many cases becomes the marching orders. So every year when you're trying to meet plan, it's because somebody agreed to it. And we're we in finance, we, we, we like to make sure that we really lock those plans in. So not only do we give you the targets that we hand to you, we gonna pay you to hit the plans, right? We're gonna tire incentives to actually achieving those plans. Okay? Doesn't that sound like a good way to reinforce that behavior? To get what you're, if you pay for it, you ought to get it. Okay? Now the problem with that is if you move into beyond budgeting, what, what we found in, we've found in the books, in our research and the work we've done, what we found is that those plans, any one of 'em, any variation inevitably are based on thousands and thousands of assumptions about what's gonna happen to the economy, what's gonna happen with key suppliers, what's gonna happen with key customers.

00:02:35

And so all while all these plans are based on assumptions, we rarely write those down. We usually agree on a negotiated plan. But the problem is in the planning process is everybody's got real smart about the budgeting game 'cause it's been around about a hundred years. And then the budgeting game, you know how it's played. If you're real smart, if you're a naive budgeter, you come in and put all your money on the table and then we cherry pick you. Once you get brave and get burned by that process, you learn. You don't hide, you don't put anything on the table. You go in and you talk about his, Jack Welch said in his book, Jack, straight From the Gut, if you come in from the field and you talk about how rough the economy is, how tough the competition is, and if you give maximum effort, you might be able to do a little bit better than you did before.

00:03:15

Now corporate can't let you get away with that. 'cause if we let all the field organizations just get away with what they said they could do, it wouldn't add up to enough. And we've already told the investors that we're gonna get 'em up here. So corporate's always trying to leverage you up. So when you come in to make that argument, corporate's on the other side talking about all the growth initiatives. And they bring out benchmarks and they bring out blue ocean strategy and all kinds of things. Says you really ought to be up here. Those it guys have got great growth strategies. Why aren't you way up here? And so they try to stretch you up. And so the better lot better part of a day, the council be in a room back and forth arguing and they'll agree somewhere, feel, say, I can only do 10.

00:03:51

Corporate says, you must do 20 into the day. They wind up at 15 field drags out of the room beating people until they get about two blocks away and they go, woo. Boy, those corporate boys are tough <laugh>. I thought we'd never get outta there. 15 will be tough, but I've got some cookies they haven't found yet. We ought to be able to be. Okay. Corporate guys wait till they gather room. They go, woo, can you believe those field guys coming here and saying you can only do 10? But I thought we'd never get 'em above the floor. This thing gets harder and harder every day. Now, if you're truly an investor in that company, how do you feel about all that great talent that's spent that day arguing, not overgrowth, not over opportunities, but really arguing over what's the minimal acceptable return. And most organizations, your budget is the minimal accessible return based on assumptions that are gonna turn out to be wrong.

00:04:37

And that's the dumb stuff we've gotta stop doing. And it's worse than that. Not only you spend all the time wasting getting to the budget, then because we're smart in finance, we're gonna make sure you hit those numbers. How every month you're gonna get visited by a management accountant who's gonna come ask you to explain the variances and tell us why you aren't on the dotted line you're supposed to be on. Why are you spending so much money And oh by the way, our growth assumption or our, we're not making as much and about halfway through the year, we're gonna all of a sudden cut back. Has anybody ever lived through an arbitrary cutback? Have you ever had a 5%, 10% across the board? I ran cost management for Arthur Anderson. I'm a global expert in cost management. I will tell you, a worst practice is an across the board cost cut.

00:05:23

If your management ever makes a across the board cost cut, they have just admitted to the world. They have no clue. They have no clue about where the right place to cut the costs are. Okay. In the workshop this afternoon, I'll tell you about cost cutting. We'll, we'll get into that a little bit deeper, but lemme move on. The interest of time. We went out, we found companies so good, they didn't budget at all. We documented what they did, we gathered up the practices and what we found were a set of 12 principles, better ways to plan and control. The first six are leadership principles, the second sick or process principles in the workshop. We'll go deeper into these, but lemme suffice and say to you, these principles allow us to take that budget where you've taken everything, target setting, incentive comp, action planning, resource allocation, where you've bundled that all together.

00:06:13

It allows us to s secure out how to pull that apart and look at each one of those things management's trying to do, which is a valid thing to try to do. But it allows us to time each one of those things and do it in a better way. Better ways to set targets, better ways to incent people, better ways to action plan. And we'll talk about that in the workshop this afternoon. But these 12 principles are the foundation about it. Now these came out in a book by Harvard Business School Press. I showed you the books there a second ago. That uh, brown one, the orange at Brown one, 2003. Beyond budgeting, how managers can break free from the annual performance traps. The updated version of that is the one next to it. The leader's dilemma. That's the streamlined version. Okay? If you wanna start, leader's Dilemma is a great place to start.

00:06:56

If you wanna jumpstart and you cheat and run ahead, go all the way down to the Future Ready book, how to Master Business Forecasting. 'cause that's a great place to get started on that. Okay? Now what is your finance organization focused on? Well, they got a lot of stuff going on. A lot of stuff going on. We're off the page with stuff we're going on. So we're really river busy people. We're busy, busy, busy, busy, busy. But the problem with finance and most things, when you think about the orientation and if you're trying to, part of this talk is to help prepare you to have conversations with your finance organization. You've gotta ask yourself, where is your finance organization focused in a simpler way rather than this laundry list of things that everybody's doing. And we do all these things and a whole lot more.

00:07:41

We couldn't get on the page. What you find is the most situation, your finance organization, where are they? In most cases in finance, we have a preponderance of positioning ourselves if we're a ship on the ocean. Okay, anybody ever been on a cruise? When you're on a cruise, what are the two main questions you want to answer? Somebody's gonna give you a free cruise. What do you want to know? Where are we going? And really important, what cabin do I have? <laugh>. Now you guys are in, in DevOps mostly. What cabin does DevOps have? Where do you guys get to hang out on the cruise ship? Your business is a cruise ship. Where does DevOps get to hang out? Right next to the engine? Next to the engine? You think finance is next to the engine room? No, the engineers and the DevOps don't want us anywhere near that one guy said, we're sitting on the hatch to keep the auditors from wandering around aimlessly. Now, I'll submit to you most of your finance organizations, we are positioned on the stern of the ship. If you're not real nautical, the stern is the back of the boat. We spend most of our times at the back of the boat staring at the wake, yelling over our shoulder to the captain. We seem to be going about this fast that we might be turning

00:08:57

<laugh>.

00:09:00

How much strategic value do you think anybody can add? Looking at where we have been and telling somebody we might be turning finance is in the process of getting off the back of the boat and in getting up, what we've gotta do is we've gotta get up on the bridge beside the captain and start looking forward. And what we see in the beyond budgeting movement is a move to become much more proactive to start answering questions about the future. And that's where we can add value in terms of what's out there. So when you think about how you're gonna talk with your finance organization, you've gotta ask yourself some questions. Are they reactive or proactive? If they spend most of the time reactive, they're on the back of the boat. If they're trying to turn around, help them become more proactive. Tactical or strategic tactics are there strategics are here, corporate or frontline in many cases, where do they house?

00:09:53

One of the most important things NA means will talk about is how they took the fp and a function. And instead of it being in the ivory tower, they were able to embed it in the business. What happens so much about what I read, uh, the Phoenix uh, project, so much of that's about how they took disparate silos and broke 'em down and got people working together. Well, you've gotta figure out how to get your finance organization working together. What Naveen was able to do at TW Telecom was to take the fp and a function and not have it work centrally, but put it into the fields. As they got out there trying to work on those different markets they were trying to develop, well put the fp and a person right there. Now all of a sudden they're involved in the conversation. As the deals are getting cooked, they're looking to see which are the most attractive customers to go after.

00:10:39

So your finance can have much more, uh, uh, effect if you'll get to the front line and understand more. Really moving from command and control, which is the old way, the way we've been doing it since the 1920s in, in budgeting into a much more adaptive and proactive system. That's what we're trying to move toward. And that's what the round table is headed toward. Now there's often been a struggle between finance and it, you know how these words go. You know, we need visibility control, we need to move faster, we need to launch products, we need to close assets. We're not within policy. You're an obstacle. And we get down to the name calling <laugh>, you're the geek, you're the bean counter. These kind of things aren't really healthy. It's nice to poke fun in a congenial sense, but in most cases we gotta figure out how to, how to realize and get on the same team. So let me bring Naveen up and let her chat with you a little bit about how they made this transition at TW Telecom and what it, uh, what it brings for you, Navin.

00:11:42

So I'm gonna primarily talk about my experience as it related with me being the being counter and my counterparts on the technology side and really trying to bridge that gap because I think that's probably what you're most interested in in terms of how that process worked. And it, it almost started like that except we were a little bit more respectful about what we called each other. But, um, the bottom line is that it requires a conversation. It requires a difficult conversation. At the time when we first started transition our, our planning process away from budgeting and really started having these difficult conversations around, well, what all the things that we just broke in the organization. Because when you pull the budget out, you break your forecasting process, you break your planning process, you break your rewards process, target setting, resource allocation, all that stuff suddenly is no longer the way it was.

00:12:27

And you have to reconfigure all of it. So as we were doing this, we, we realized the need for conversation. Now here's the problem. I'm sitting here, I'm very well grounded in finance. I get all this. I'm actually not even all that stupid about our technology and the things we do as a business to serve our customers. But for me, scrum is a rugby thing and swarming is what bees do, right? And servers are people that work in restaurants. I know more understood what my IT counterparts were telling me than you understand why I'm using a five year project beta value of our stock to calculate a wac. So there's a language barrier, there's a, there's a communication problem there that you have to overcome. And it requires really nothing more than sitting down and having those conversations like, Hey, I don't know what you're saying to me.

00:13:09

I don't know how to evaluate this project you're working on. I don't know how to think about the funding you're asking me for because you're speaking Greek to me or you're speaking it to me. I don't get you. So we literally started having a lot of conversations. We would have our IT people come in and our, we call scary pictures on the whiteboard 'cause they would draw up the infrastructure and actually spend the time explaining it to us. And that took a lot for them because they would get really frustrated with us and we're like, okay, help me understand what you're doing. Help me figure out how this creates value. Help me figure out how this changes things. And we actually got to a place of common language. Now this is, it takes effort. This took a lot of like, you know, people gripping the edge of the table trying not to get frustrated with each other.

00:13:50

But it worked. And it got us to a place where not only were we able to understand what they were asking for, we were able to put it into context for the executives. We were able to figure out how to align our strategic plan with our tactical plan. With our financial plan. We were able to have good conversations about capacity. We understood that as we were reconfiguring our planning cycle, aligning it with how they were trying to move the IT organization to a place of much more dynamic release release things. I'm gonna use all the wrong words 'cause I'm finance geek, right? So, but basically being much more nimble in their processes and allowing us to align up our planning process with them is what ultimately got us to collaborate on the overall business plan a lot better. But it takes effort and it takes a lot of patients on both sides to really start breaking down us.

00:14:34

Those terminology. We did the same thing with our engineering department and, and help them understand, you know, technology better. What that did for us, as Steve already alluded to my finance team, were really becoming subject matter experts in the organizations they were embedded in. They became business partners for those organizations and helped do those necessary translations to make sure that things like understanding how you don't necessarily manage IT projects based on capital projects, but you fund those teams that they have and fund those production streams that they're pushing through for the organization. And finding a way to make that still work with the accounting constraints. Because the problem you're gonna run into when you first start talking to your finance and accounting organization is they have, you know, SEC and gap and audit and regulatory requirements and all these things that they have to close the books on.

00:15:23

It's heavily scrutinized. There's no flexibility there. So they don't understand how you can transform those things to be something that aligns with what your goal is, which is to be really nimble and agile. And so it requires a lot of conversation and collaboration. But I, I swear you, you can get there, we did it. We managed to get the organization to move to where we were funding their persistent teams on a quarterly basis and they had flexibility within those constructs. Um, the thing is to look for those intersecting needs. We all have our own personal things that we're focused on, but at the end of the day, we all work for the same company and we're all like search, searching for how to make that place more successful, right? That's really what it's, but it's about, and there is common ground there, you just have to go look for it, right?

00:16:05

So it's, it's about visibility. Finance wants that just as much as you guys want visibility of your projects and the progress you're making, it's about getting things done. How can we get things complete? Now from a finance accounting perspective, it's about closing the books, right? It's about making sure that we can get those asset booked to the ledgers so we can start paying taxes on and all that other stuff For you guys, it's about actually putting things into production about serving customers and users and, and getting products and services out there. But like I said, at the end of the day, it's really about, um, achieving success. Now there are an amazing amount of places where you overlap, and I know those aren't necessarily always intuitive, but, um, here's just an example and I guarantee you that list can probably, there's probably 10 more things we can add to that list, but finance is really big on metrics.

00:16:49

<laugh>, we are all over tracking and analyzing and taking things apart and looking at, you know, what are the best possible performance metrics we can measure. Well guess what, you guys hold the key to where very many of those are created, stored and can actually collaborate on pulling some of those things together. Our, um, process of gathering metrics and actually sorting through the ones that were really meaningful and useful for the organization was enhanced orders of magnitude when we started collaborating more with our friends in it, um, data quality and accuracy, uh, I mean garbage in, garbage out was a standard thing that we would always say because we were so paranoid about being able to trust any data that wasn't part of the general ledger. And the reason being the general ledger was heavily scrutinized. It was audited, it was reconciled, it was the one system that we knew we could rely on.

00:17:39

And so then we would spend hours if not weeks, doing these things of, okay, so I have my revenue report from my general ledger, which I can trust because it's been signed off in blood by the auditors and the chief accounting officer and everybody else. And then we have a billing system or we have some revenue sub-ledger system, or we have, you know, God forbid the marketing system where they track all their product revenues and none of these things overlap and reconcile. So there's a very common mission between finance and, and the IT organization actually to get data to be accurate and to get to single sources of data. So there's a joint mission there, but that often isn't necessarily on the same path. But again, a great place where you can find common ground between finance and IT to start having some really meaningful conversations.

00:18:19

Compliance and security is, I mean, compliance has always been a big thing for finance, but security now is too because of all the requirements that come with customer data, with financial transactions, all those types of things. I know topic near and dear to your guys' hearts too because security is like a big thing. And so the more, again, it's another place where you can find common ground and collaborate. And like I said, at the end of the day, this goes back to business success, business growth and success. But I guarantee you there are probably, like I said, 10 more things you can add to the list. Now for us, one of the neat things was working collaboratively with our IT organization. Um, when they would draw those scary pictures, we had gotten to this, um, code of where anytime there was a system where somebody would, you know, look at data and then type it into another system, like a swivel chair kind of thing, they would draw a little person.

00:19:07

And so we, we began this collective improvement project of how do we get rid of all the little people on the whiteboard. Not that we actually wanted to get rid of people, but get rid of those nonsensical tasks where people are doing double entry work, right? Um, so we, we became partners in trying to uncover those things and actually collaborate on how we can get that done. Um, I was in charge of all the funding, uh, for the company. So that was part of my job as the capital funding allocations. So my relationship with it initially was a very, um, uh, command and control one. It's like, you be nice to me or I'm not going to approve your project. That was kind of my position. I learned very quickly that was not necessarily a good position to be and when you want people to cooperate with you.

00:19:49

So we moved very quickly to a help me understand, let's collaborate. How do I get you guys moving forward? That doesn't mean it was carte blanche. That doesn't mean it was a free for all. It was just much more collaborative and they started to understand the financial constraints of the business. It's like, yes, I get this is a cool new thing you wanna buy. However, we can't afford it this quarter, so let's figure out when we can't afford it. Or let's figure out the trade offs. And by the way, if you're sitting over there on a bunch of capital projects that you're not actually doing any work on, give 'em back because hoarding capital in an organization is an absolute detriment when you can actually invest it in something that could provide value. We also got really creative in working not just on those ROI things, but on, on um, calculating and quantifying things like risk aversion.

00:20:38

So how do we make things like, um, systems that detect fraud, for example, pay for themselves because fraud is one of those things that may never happen. So how do you cost justify those kinds of investments? How do you give it a skunkworks function where they can play with some capital so that it's not as heavily scrutinized as something that has to create immediate return? We had this running joke that things that were called strategic meant, it was a lot of investment before we saw any kind of return. So we had a strategic funding bucket basically to allow people to do some experimentation and to do some, um, real creative, uh, you know, out of the box, new product kind of things that you couldn't model because there wasn't really a surrogate for it in the marketplace yet. But again, it required a lot of communication, a lot of learning each other's language and a lot of understanding and a lot of white boarding of, help me understand what this looks like in our infrastructure.

00:21:29

So part of our, um, request from you guys is we'd love to hear about where you're running into those problems with, with the, with your finance organization and how you're trying to fund your development, your production, your operations and what resources might be useful in terms of enabling that communication. So, um, we wanna live a little bit of time for that. I can get deeper into some of the stuff we did at, at TW telecom because we were, um, in a transition phase for that company. It was, it started as a traditional telecom company. Lots of very heavy infrastructure, fiber optic cables and you know, in the streets, lots of equipment, those types of things. And during the, during those 10 years when we were doing this very innovative stuff on the finance side, we very much so transitioned to a very software centric organization. 'cause that's where the industry was moving. So that was part of the push from, um, our technology organization was really that we had to get more nimble because of this much more software centric type of infrastructure. So anybody have any questions or thoughts around how uh, or the types of issues you're running into or some of the experiences that we live through interacting between

00:22:34

Good one here? Go ahead.

00:22:35

Sure. Um, how do you reconcile is probably in a lot of, on this question, um, agile delivery methodologies and the capital process in terms of putting things in service and stuff like that where you're gonna have a flow of, of capabilities that are going in. How do you deal with that in the context of capitalization where and many software firms, they do all expense, it's all opex, they don't even, they don't even do the capital. So if you could speak a little bit

00:22:57

To that. Sure. Um, we absolutely can.

00:22:58

Let's repeat that. How do, the question I think is twofold. One is, is how do we deal with the, the capitalization issues and secondarily, how do we just capital expenditure altogether? How do you make sure that you're always able to be agile and persistent, right? And

00:23:11

Where, and and also where some software companies do not have to deal with that. They, they do opex, right?

00:23:16

Right. They don't even do it through capital, right? Well, we absolutely capitalized all our technical labor force, both our, um, on the IT development side as well as our technician workforce. And so what we ultimately, the construct that we ultimately got to was rather than creating sort of a, a product based project package from, from finance that said, okay, you finish the project and then we'll capitalize it. We created a quarterly cadence and that was aligned with our planning process. So we moved away from an annual plan, we moved to truly a quarterly plan and every quarter we would fund those works. So like our IT department, they had a team that worked just on the, um, ordering system. We had a team that worked the billing system. We had a team that worked the, the um, production systems, a team that worked, trouble management, those types of things.

00:23:57

We would fund that team for a quarter and at the end of the quarter we, whatever releases were in there, we would close that to assets. So that was closed to the ordering system asset at that point and then we would fund for the next quarter. But they had flexibility within that say they decided, you know what, there isn't enough stuff to do in ordering because the products we're working on are really all over on the, um, back office side on the ordering system or the billing system side. If they moved resources over, essentially we would just close this project short and close that project over. And at the end of the day it worked out. 'cause they had to, you know, they had that many resources. It wasn't ever gonna swing hugely. It just depended on where they were doing the work.

00:24:34

The other half of that answer is that what we see in companies that are moving beyond budgeting is that they really rethink capital authorization, capital allocation. In most companies under traditional budgeting, which dates to a 1920s blueprint, their capital is like an investment bank that's only open three months outta the year. If you get your idea in, in the queue and it gets discussed, it gets funded. But capital gets funded for the full year. God forbid you have a good year after they've already decided I've seen railroads turn down profitable business 'cause they don't wanna spend any more capital 'cause it's not in the plan. So part of that construct, just like the budget creates this annual plan that people march to, regardless of the fact that all the assumptions change capital authorization the same way. So what we've been seeing companies do from an actual practice, and I say the principles we find from beyond budgeting come from actual practice.

00:25:23

We find people not allocating all their capital in a once a year process, allocate a quarter's worth or or their 20% worth, but always have a pool to keep coming back and have that time four times a year, five times a year. American Express, they do it five times a year and their capital, it is not just capital. They can capitalize. It's any discretionary spending. They have a meeting five times a year. The important point Naveen made, I wanna reemphasize na uh, Naveen's counterpart, Jamie CRO and American Express said when they did, she said they knew they had won when she found investment managers putting capital back on the table. What's the return on investment on a capital dollar that you have not spent yet? Zero zero. And if you hold it for six months, eight months, 12 months, just so you make sure you get it, you've tied it up and there's no return.

00:26:09

So when she said, when she found people putting the capital back on the table, now they only put it back on the table. If they know six months later, eight months later, they know they can get it back. You gotta break a hoarding mentality. If you do the once a year allocation, people hoard capital and they get it. Even they can't, even though they can't use it, they hang on to it. So that's kind of the culture that we've gotta break with these new pro process and always being able to come back and ask for capital. So think about your capital allocation process. Can you do it 3, 4, 5 times a year so that you're always, the investment bank is always open, not just for a minuscule of things.

00:26:42

And we actually did it weekly except that we'd fund the development teams for a quarter so they wouldn't have to come back for projects every week. Does that answer your question? Yeah, that's good.

00:26:51

Yes.

00:26:53

Uh, he mentioned opex. Yeah. Which I assume is OP

00:26:57

Operating expense dispensing.

00:26:58

Yeah.

00:26:58

Could you talk about that a little bit about that alternative?

00:27:02

Well, so the, the um, operating expense concept is it, it really depends on how your accounting department runs their financials. Um, there is, there are certain things that as an organization you're supposed to capitalize, like the development of software. 'cause it's essentially an asset. There are organizations who treat it as an expense item. So it becomes essentially not an asset, not of any long term value. And it, it's a, it's an accounting choice that somebody made a decision around how to make, but it's basically just treating everything as an expense. And in that case, you're really locked into budgets typically because you're, you're not gonna run things in projects, right?

00:27:37

But from an accounting point of view, we have FASB's, we have specific rules that say what can a company capitalize versus not capitalize? Software companies get away with it because they're, they're, they're building products. They're not building in, they're not building fixed assets for internal use. They're building something to sell. And until they figured out they can actually sell it, they don't capitalize. It's more conservative. Operating companies have slightly different rules, but when your accountant says, we gotta follow these rules, sit down and get a copy of the rules with and make sure and then find the process that works because we've got good examples. And that's the reason we bring real companies. So we can share with you what did TW do, what did American Express do, what did Stat Oil do? And be able to have those kind of conversations to help you get to the right answer for your company. That's

00:28:17

Another question. Yes,

00:28:18

Go ahead. Good sir. Yes, sir.

00:28:19

So, um, as we're moving away from physical assets and toward the cloud, right? How is, how are you seeing that impact the forecast and budgeting and those financial conversations from CapEx opex?

00:28:32

It's actually not that different because even, I mean, what's being capitalized is the software. So it really doesn't matter where it sits. Um, obviously you're gonna have less of a hardware, a hard asset that you're gonna be capitalizing if you're making things go live in a cloud. Um, but so it, again, it really depends on how your firm is looking at that from an accounting rules perspective. But software, if you're building it for your internal use, to Steve's point, it is an, it's considered an asset even though it is software and it has a short life, but it has a life. And so you treat it like, you know, as if you're buying anything else and depreciated and all that good stuff. So, um, again, it, the rules are really dependent on what you're doing with it and what, what type of business you're in.

00:29:10

In terms of the software for planning, there's been a huge shift to cloud-based planning systems. So the old legacy systems like Hyperion Planning and things like that, they're still there, but they've quit commissioning their sales force on that. They've swung to the cloud too. People ask me about the cloud, I said, well, there was a cloud war and the cloud one, okay, now when I say that security still remains an issue, I have a particular client we'll be going to see next week. We went through a software selection. They picked the cloud vendor for all the reasons you picked cloud vendors. And then at the end of the day, they couldn't their IT team and the COD vendor's IT team, they couldn't figure out the security part of it. And so now we're on an on-premise version, okay? So, so be cautious about the cloud. It is accelerating development, certainly in the planning space, it's accelerating development. But get the security question up front. Try to get your IT teams to make sure they're gonna be comfortable with whatever's being proposed for the cloud and what the information is. Finance people, we tend to be a little sensitive, you know, that is the plans of the business, that is the profitability of the business. So when you're, when your CFO says that's important information, just be careful around that. It's pretty sensitive for it. So

00:30:17

We're at the end of our time, but we'll be around to answer questions during the break. And then also we have immediately after this in this room, a workshop. So we're gonna continue the

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Conversation. If you would like to continue, just stand up, stretch your legs, ask us some questions. We'll be back here in 10 minutes. We have a, we have some more slides, we'll take you into deeply. In the TW telecom case. I'll tell my story about cost reduction that you can use back to protect yourself if you're, if somebody's threatening cost reduction, I've got a real good story you need to take back with you. But we'll be back in here in 10 minutes to, to go with our, with our workshop. Thank you guys for coming. Appreciate it.