 And welcome to a Wednesday episode of Security Matters Hawaii. I'm Andrew, the security guy here in the Think Tech Hawaii studios. And today we're bringing in a remote guest, an amazing guy. He does a lot for our industry. He is the founder. He's the managing director of the SAGE Group. And they produce an industry event, unlike any other, called the Great Conversation in Security. Ron Warman is with us today. Ron, I really appreciate you taking some time out of your schedule to join me. Aloha, Andrew. Fantastic to be with you. Great, man. Many members of our audience may not know your history with the industry and the history of the Great Conversation. So could you share with us whatever you will about that history and what brings you to the Great Conversation's most recent event? 17 years ago, by nature, I met this as a strategist. And I come from the IT industry. 17 years ago, I was exposed to one of my customers in the physical security industry. And they asked me to do an analysis of the marketplace for a strategic plan. And in that analysis, I interviewed many consultants, integrators, manufacturers. And quite frankly, I saw a dysfunctional ecosystem. There were silos of practices that weren't very well-integrated. And I took a little scorecard from history. I happened to be a history buff. And that scorecard represented the great conversation of philosophers, theologians, historians, scientists who, through time and through a great conversation, changed everything. And I said, why don't we start a great conversation in security? And that's how it happened. Wow. So how long have you been doing that? I think I've been attending for maybe six, seven years. When did it get started, officially? We started it in 2003, so about 16, 17 years ago, yeah. I missed out on a decade. It's no wonder I'm still catching up. Well, it took a long time. I tell you, Andrew, one of the dysfunctions of the marketplace was a lack of trust with those business disciplines we just called out. So we had, over time, to earn that trust that this wasn't a shill event for manufacturers, nor was it a lead generation tool for integrators. But it sincerely was a collection of disciplines out to change an industry and create a new value proposition. So it's taken a long time. Wow. Who were the most difficult to get to come to the table? Well, I'm going to say everybody there. No, I really am. We first teased out that there was a value proposition, a fundamental business value proposition to the risk resilience and security function. And of course, 17 years ago, everyone laughed and said, we're a cost center dude. What's the matter with you? Right? Yeah, for sure. So you can imagine. And then the other thing, I spoke. I did a keynote in front of integrators one day. And I said, you've been complaining to me that you don't have a seat at the table. And I said, you say, because you don't have a seat at the table that you're always in responding to RFIs, you're responding with a low cost value proposition, and you're at the mid-level management. And I said, I have a fundamental question for each of you. Raise your hand. Who taught the marketplace how you sell? We did. Thank you. And obviously, there's an interesting marriage between the manufacturer and integrator. And then the consultant, we started digging into that. And it was funny, because behind the scenes, unknown to the client, the consultant was tapping the system integrator for all this technical knowledge. And yet that technical knowledge wasn't really germane to their best business practices. And so we had clear dysfunction all the way through the ecosystem. So how do we all come together and start getting on the same page so we can drive that? Now, this has become critical in this day and age, because now we're going through another change. And the change is, we're no longer in the risk resilience industry. That just happens to be our discipline. We're actually in the information management industry. We're in a sensor-driven world where we're being asked more and more to take part as part of the tapestry of the organizational vision, mission, and organizational operational objectives. You see that in the smart building initiatives, the smart city initiatives. We're becoming integrated into that fabric. And I don't think the ecosystem has naturally caught up with that. I was going to say, it seems to me that business is more ready for us than we are ready to contribute to the business mission. Wow, I'm copying that down for my next blog. That's absolutely right. No, it's absolutely right on. Greg Creed, a CEO of Yum Brands, a Fortune 500 company, addressed the last great conversation of, of course, executives and their teams. And he said, I have news for you. What's not on my balance sheet that describes the core value of my company? And everyone's scratching their heads, and he goes, people. And so he goes, so I want to leverage what I do is I leverage people to create organizational objectives. And fulfill those organizational objectives. And he said, he really asked the question, is security doing the same thing? Is security creating a relevant, easy, and distinctive value proposition to the enterprise? And of course, everyone's pretty silent. And he goes, that's what I'm asking my CSO to do. Nice. Nice, it's interesting. We talk a lot about training, right? Everyone has a training as an expense for our people. And I look at some of the percentages. I know NSCA puts out the, they have a pretty good vision on whatever, when at least volunteers that they spend on training percentage-wise. We do triple that at our company. And I don't think it's enough. I'm constantly begging for training budget. How else are we going to build value in our people, Ron? I mean, what do you think about that? Is it, do we have to, afford to invest in order to improve? I want to say quickly, yes, but. And so I'm going to do the but, because you and I can smile at this one. The hard lesson of business is it works off profit. I'm going to say that again. The hard lesson of business, it works off profit. So the bottom line is, you're constantly managing, this is the lesson for security executives as well, you're constantly managing risk and opportunity. The risk is, if you aren't able to convey a value proposition within the mean time of a chief financial officer, you're going to have a harder time to ask for money. In your business, Andrew, if you're asking for training dollars, you've got to translate that in a time to value business proposition for your company. And that's just managing risk and opportunity. Yeah, we have metrics for performance. And we run a very high utilization rate on our people already. So I feel like we've squeezed a lot out of them. And it's like, wow, where do we go next? How do we bring more value out of the staff, the entire pyramid of the staff? It's not just the system engineer at the top. It's not just the account manager that's doing the interface with the customer. But all the lessons and knowledge that's being sort of learned and sponged up down there in the field, I don't think it's translating up very well. And at some point, I don't know what the maximum efficiency is. I mean, can we get to 100% or is 88% going to be all we've got to offer? So just so all our listeners are making sure they're focusing on the right thing, right now, we're talking about the system integration business, not necessarily the end user. But let's go to the end user for a second and see if they value training. So the end user at this time, and we do surveys all the time, in fact, you know what? Our preferred measurable outcome is for a great conversation. It's very simple. And you would have seen it in Plano on May 21 at the YUM Center of Excellence. After each presentation, we ask a very simple question. What are you taking away from here that you're going to activate in the short term or within the next year that will change or improve or inform your program? What's the takeaway? So the end user is demanding this. I just called out a sensor-driven world. Andrew, as an advisor to our business, we need you to inform our people, perform roles in a measurable process, using technology to create the value proposition that informs my CEO and his executive team, who are the true owners of risk far away. So if your training does that, it should give you a distinctive competitive edge in the marketplace. Yeah, did he talk about that cost? I mean, so from a Fortune 500 perspective, does he have a way to value that? Like in other words, if his integration team is bringing him 5% more value, can he afford to pay 4% more for it and be happy to collect that extra point? Or does he need a sort of a zero-sum game at the end for his investment? What's your feeling there? Well, first of all, let's get off Greg because Greg doesn't get into that level of detail. Okay. That would be the mid-level management in the CSO. So let's get off Greg for a second. Let's talk about the persona that you're marketing to. So let me ask you a question, Andrew. Most integrators you know, including yourself, at what level of management do you most often engage? And who is that? Is it the IT guy? Is it the security manager who's been tasked with evaluating a solution? Who do you most often engage with? I would say it does vary across the customer, but in the government space, it tends to be the engineering team that's taking care of the four-star. In the healthcare space, it tends to be the facility and IT team together. But as soon as I get out of enterprise, oftentimes it's the owner or the owner's representative and they're not very well-versed in what they even wanna achieve with security in their organization. Right, right. And most often, let's face it, for all your listeners, again, just a little bit of history is if you study your history, you'll be able to understand your future. The way the security industry started was with a lock and a key on a door. And so you fell into a construction marketplace, a contractor marketplace, and any contractor will tell you they're in a low-margin marketplace. So that's your history, and you haven't necessarily developed a contract model out of that, have you? Yeah, it seems like a good consultant's in there first, right? And so the consultant has that back channel, and of course they're working with us around the GC, but yeah, I didn't think about the new construction market is definitely GC controlled. You know, it's big, which we don't do out of that. Yeah, but again, back to construction, whether it's retrofitting or new, you end up having a whole ecosystem there. And what are we seeing in our marketplace, Andrew? We're seeing more cognizance around the smart building. We're seeing more cognizance around the value of security by design. We're seeing more cognizance over a lead or energy-certified building. In fact, to support the brand of the organization as well. So we're seeing all these things, and it's incumbent upon the vendors in the marketplace to actually bridge those new innovations, those new models of value into what we traditionally have sold in the marketplace. And that's the $100 million question. Who solves that instead of being leaders in their silos? Yeah, and I've definitely been watching for that lead. You know, I know there's been some manufacturers, large ones that have built some huge centers now that are showing what's possible, but that's all been brand new and just built, right? And they're still having trouble, I think parsing the value of the data itself. But we're starting to gather it, which was at least we've become aware if that's the first step. Well, see, one of the keys to success for leaders like you, Andrew, is whoever, I've always said whoever asks the best questions, win. They win, right? Because they're curious, they're naturally curious, they're listening, they're not selling their company or their product all the time. They're actually trying, as Steve Jobs said, the best way to understand what a customer wants is study their behaviors, not what they say, right? So the people in a process using tools. But let's talk about another model, because we're talking about contract models. And I know this is near and dear to your heart trying to figure this out. What if I told you that the smart building is working off a model that I call the utility model? Okay. When I go and flip on the light switch in my home, do I ask myself, how am I gonna build this whole infrastructure that supplies me energy? No, I flip on a switch, right? Which leads me to more strategic ownership over my assets, right? So I think what you're gonna see more and more in this industry, unfortunately, for the vendor community, they keep calling it recurring monthly revenue and all sorts of things that's very almost a myopic view. What we need to do is create a new, they're telling me this, create a new contract model that allows them to focus on the metrics that matter. The security strategy, the planning, the risk intelligence and so forth. And then we need to learn how to help them just turn on the switch and supply that security infrastructure as a service. You're gonna see that more and more in the utility model. Yeah, I'm definitely ready to bundle security up as a service for anybody that can consume it that way. Great insight from Ron Warman. We're gonna be right back in about one minute after we pay a few bills, stick around. Aloha. I am Deila Nyonegira, a host here at Think Tech Hawaii, a digital media company serving the people of Hawaii. We provide a video platform for citizen journalists to raise public awareness in Hawaii. We are a Hawaii nonprofit that depends on the generosity of its supporters to keep on going. We'd be grateful if you'd go to thinktechhawaii.com and make a donation to support us now. Thank you so much. Aloha, I'm Dennis Wong, a host here at Think Tech Hawaii, a digital media company serving the people of Hawaii. We provide a video platform for citizen journalists to raise public awareness in Hawaii. We are a Hawaii nonprofit that depends on the generosity of its supporters to keep on going. We'd be grateful if you'd go to thinktechhawaii.com and make a donation to support us now. Thanks so much. Hey, Aloha, and welcome back to Security Matters Hawaii. We're talking with Ron Warman today of the SAGE Group, who produces a great conversation and brings us, I think, the industry's leading thinking. So Ron, sharing that with you today. If you didn't make it, Ron, thanks again for joining us. We were talking a little bit about that value that the customer can see he needs now, value that he expects us to bring, and not just us, all of his service providers. The entire supply chain, I think, is under scrutiny for bringing day business intelligence, and that's in the form of data from sensor companies like ours. What else did they talk about that everybody needs to prepare for? Oh, okay, within the last couple of great conversations, and remember, I want to make sure people know how we do this. So we're having conversations all day with the ecosystem. It starts with the senior executives who run the strategy and planning for risk resilience and security. So we're having conversations all day long. Secondly, we're having conversations with the manufacturer community, like investors, we don't want to be investing in what was yesterday. We want to know what the roadmap is for tomorrow. What are they doing about this sensor-driven world? We talk about the applied intelligence, which are the integrators, which is an under-leverage resource for most CSOs. They don't realize that you guys are the ones that, at the end of the day, test and inspect these solutions, deal with the problems associated with the technology and the technology rollout. That is stuff we have not mined very well as a research and development tool. And then, of course, consultants who specify, but need to either bring on as outside experts or become trained in what I call the highly disrupted influence to their assessments. And the highly disrupted influence is technology. It's a lot of sales guys like to say, we're not going to talk technology right now. Let's just talk about what you need. No, Uber, Uber fundamentally changed the business model of taxis. Amazon fundamentally changed the way we purchase goods. And by the way, will be services in the future. Airbnb fundamentally changed the way we think about hotel rooms. And what we're seeing right now is this business is about to get Uberized. What are the key indicators of getting Uberized? If you're dealing with complex stuff that should be simple. If you're trying to make it hard when it should be easy, the customer experience I'm referring to, if you have a shortage of labor that actually has the subject matter expertise that deal with the complexity and the price and the cost of doing business is high, does that sound like our business is about to get Uberized? Yeah, you just described the security industry completely. That's right. And by the way, I've actually had some vendors, not you, say, thank God we're complex, otherwise we'd be out of a job. No, you'd be out of a business model that you're in today, not out of a job, right? Because if you understand what's going on, you'll pivot and we'll go from there. When we went to commercial, we were talking about Uberization when it comes to the business model in the utility model. And what small integrators are going to have to do is maybe team up with data centers that already have that subject matter expertise because you're not going to be able to build that on your own, right? But they're definitely going to still need that business intelligence that they haven't mined yet, Andrew, and that is you know how it works. Yeah, and I have not, you know there's, well, I shouldn't say none. There are only a few manufacturers in our industry that are married to the data centers, Google, Amazon, the Microsoft environment, and actually bringing in all kinds of disparate data to provide business intelligence that's aligned with the security questions that someone may have. And I can count them on one hand right now and that doesn't mean I know everything's happening globally for sure. But there are not enough of us, I think yet, willing to, I guess, take the risk of looking at what's possible and then working with the customer to drive the value that can come from the learning. Because machines sort of do it for us. You know it's basically machine learning, it's leveraging machine learning that's happening in the cloud and basically just getting all the data up there. And once you let the environment expose itself to the information, it just consumes it and then we can gather better, decision-making capability far more quickly and actually far more accurately than we've ever been able to do with any of the analytics or the stuff we've done for 20 years. So I don't know if this would be useful to your listeners but I've always found it useful in analyzing markets, especially in the IT world. I call it the data ladder. So let's start at the bottom, just to recognize in everybody that the video camera you're buying, the intercom system, the access control system, these are all aggregating bits and bytes. Now watch what you buy everybody. The bits and bytes turn intelligible, intelligent when they're put inside an application and that's why the bits and bytes turn into the access control screen that you use and you love and your video management system and your intercom management system. So it becomes applied knowledge, applied bits and bytes. And the next in the data ladder is analytics, right? So now can we apply intelligence to the data then just receive it and apply it? So then the analytics come in. Now those three things must be acknowledged and managed and you must help the client integrate them before they get to the next big thing because if you're organized then machine learning becomes easier and ultimately artificial intelligence. So we're actually in the preparation phase for machine learning and if I was in your business I'd be helping the customer get ready by getting it all integrated and getting it ready for machine learning. Yeah I have had these conversations and they almost understand what we're saying but we've got to show them, I think the combination of two pieces of data first and why that gives them a decision that's 99% accurate. And then I think we can expand it beyond it's, I think humans are still having a little trouble grasping why we need machines to gather all this information. It's so much information but with that volume comes reliability in the decision or in whatever we've tried to discern with this analytic or this algorithm or whatever it may be. I've definitely had trouble explaining it so far. You know that's been my experience. What happened at the great conversation? Do you think that the room is advanced enough to use some of this? You know it's so funny. I'm like the pastor of a church. Anyone who's ever attended a church or has talked to the pastor and that is when you have the congregation there there's always something you can improve, right? So, or something somebody has a problem with. And I like to say being the emcee for the great conversation means that I get backhanded compliments. Well, that was great, but, right, and where I'm going is they try to drag you into what's on the surface not necessarily challenging the presumptions, assumptions, presuppositions being made and their critical decision making. So, back to what I find valuable. When a CSL comes up to me and says, Ron, how do I actually create an investor grade business plan, which is what happened in the last great conversation, you know you're starting to make progress, right? Okay, yeah. I think that's pretty cool. Yeah, and it's there, I had Sarah James was on here a few weeks ago from Archulis and you know they're in the Google Cloud and they're taking a lot of the data and other IoT data up into Google's Cloud and processing it up there. And when she did her explanation to the audience here, I was looking around the room to see if they really gathered what was possible and actually we're past possibility, they're doing it now. And delivering business intelligence through that platform. And I was wondering and I didn't, I haven't gotten to ask the people in that room yet what they thought, but the surveys that we did after did not reflect that they are that far ahead yet and I don't know if that's all audiences or just the audience we had here in the islands. But I'm glad to see you're having that discussion at the great conversation because it's gonna be what I think we talk about for the decade, at least the next decade is gonna be the optimization of business intelligence. Well, we're at the first phase which is now we're starting to share transparently. We're bringing real measurable outcomes to the table through real case studies, not testimonials. And we're starting to then apply those stories. It's amazing how history is transformed through story. So we're getting close. I know to the end of your show, Andrew, what I applaud you for is bringing the stories to the table because that will help transform the industry. Yeah, we've got about a minute 30 left. What advice do you have? What kind of sort of scorecard advice do you think of? People can build for themselves if you've got a minute or so to share a little bit of that. Okay, so I'm talking to the CSO for a second, the leader of risk resilience and security but the entire transactional ecosystem can learn from it. The first thing is we don't own the risk. We all agree with that. There are people in the business who own the risk, go find them, they're in HR, they're in IT, they're in supply chain, they're even your CEO and CFO. So we don't own the risk. Through that assessment, and that can be taught, by the way, how to engage business leaders in that level of discussion, we will end up getting an operational risk intelligence picture, but as well as help them with their own value proposition on how to manage the risk. You see, if we stitch that together into a comprehensive plan, I call it an investor grade business plan, we suddenly are positioning ourselves for transformation as Michael Foynes of Microsoft says, we need to be digitally transformed. Well, we have to transform our approach too, to that model. Thank you so much. So listeners, if you wanna get engaged with the transformation of the security industry, I think you should pay attention to the great conversation and the sage group and the stuff Ron's got going on up there. He's been leading this for a long time. Ron, I really appreciate your time today. We're gonna get you back on here after the next great conversation and see where this thing's going. You're a servant leader, Andrew, thank you. Thanks, Ron. Hello, everybody.