1818 – Harnessing Technology for Human Impact with Amy Salcido

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0:58with us right now amy salcido amy you are the president of kindrell us you are found on the web at kindrell.com k-y-n-d-r-y-l.com amy thank you so much for joining us well thanks for having me josh i'm really happy to be here so tell me who is kindrell what does kindrell do Yeah, well, look, we sort of affectionately say Kendrell is one of the world's largest startups. So we were born out of a spinoff, which is a very unique experience that, you know, I had to be a part of because I don't know how often you get to experience something like that in your professional career. and you know on the day we spun off we were a 19 billion dollar business so again a very large startup but has all the sort of hallmarks of a real startup which is all the focus that we've put on culture and people and just creating an environment that really fosters entrepreneurial spirits and you know lets people think about you know how would we do this differently and look it's it's a lot of transformation that goes into that kind of startup process, but people are in it with us, right?

2:13I mean, our engagement scores have never been higher, which is just one of those things that, you know, kind of warms my heart because I feel like you can't do any kind of real transformation in business if you don't have the people with you, right? So, but look, as a company, what we really do well is we run the mission critical systems of the world, right? So we're an IT consulting and services company. And all of the keeping money running through banks, keeping planes flying in the air, all the things that we all depend on every day is really what we do all across the world. So we have a lot of longstanding client relationships.

2:54We have new client relationships we've built since the spinoff. But we really do focus our energy on how do we help clients use technology to really solve their biggest business problems, right? So not IT for the sake of IT, but how do they leverage it to do things better, faster, more efficiently, more safely, more securely, all the things that are important in the world today. but it's really, it's an honor to be able to be such a big part of our customers, you know, every day, right? We have to show up every single day and there's not a lot of room for error when you're, you know, you're talking about, again, passengers on a plane or patients in a hospital.

3:41These are, this is touching real people's lives, right? So that's, for me, such an exciting piece of it is just getting to focus on, you know, how do we help our customers serve their customers and patients and stakeholders? And that's what we do every day. Yeah. So what I'm hearing is you provide kind of IT and tech related solutions and services, as well as consulting for the biggest industries out there. I mean, it's everything from automotive, government, you know, chemical oil, gas, banking, fintech, insurance, retail, travel, transportation, healthcare. I don't know if you have like, you know, examples of clients that you've worked with, but it sounds like or it looks like you basically work with the biggest enterprise level companies on the planet.

4:29Yeah. And so you nailed it really well, Josh. So, I mean, that is exactly what we do, right? We help advise our customers and do consulting work for them on how they can run their enterprises more efficiently or better. We also can run those systems for them to make sure that, you know, nothing bad happens and that they can continue to run their business and focus on what's important to them and leave the technology to us. But some really great examples that, I mean, one of my favorite most recent examples was Children's National Hospital in Washington, D.C. And, And, you know, this is small children, right?

5:09This is a hospital for kids who are sick. It is a tough time for any parent who is there with a child. And, you know, the work that we did was really centered on how can we help this hospital serve that caregiver, the parent, as well as the caregiver, the doctor, better so that there's a better outcome and a better experience for that family and that child, right? And that's when I feel really great about what we do, you know, like that's really touching people's lives. And in that case, or in a case we, you know, had just recently as well with Care New England, which is another hospital system out of the Rhode Island area.

5:54it was really, again, how can we give them sort of a single view of that patient through technology so that the doctor or the nurse has that information at their fingertips and can make better decisions faster and doesn't have to worry about paper and doesn't have to worry about technology that may be outdated. But it's really about consolidating all of that health information in one place so that there is a quicker time to decision on how to react with a patient. And, you know, again, those are real life examples of customers that we're partnering with. And look, we also, I mean, I mentioned Airlines Delta is one of our key clients and partners as well and have been for a long time.

6:38And we continue to work together to manage, you know, some of their most important, you know, sort of technology systems and help them think about how they can go into the future, right? Because technology is changing so fast. Think about just the last year. If we rewound, I don't know if anybody could have spelled AI a year ago, and now it's everywhere. And that's just one example, right? The bad guys also don't take a rest, you know, they need to innovate every day. So security is another big thing that we focus on, making sure that our clients are secure from a cyber standpoint, as well as physical security.

7:18And, you know, the world changes fast. And we feel like we have the opportunity to, you know, to move quickly on behalf of our clients so that they can focus on what's core to them and not be trying to stay at the leading edge of technology by themselves. Yeah. Share with me, Amy, just a bit about, you know, when you're working with a client and And what insights you as a separate or kind of third-party consultancy as you're working with someone, what is Kindred typically able to reveal or allow the client to see that maybe historically they haven't been able to discover or see for themselves?

7:56Yeah, so, I mean, I just mentioned AI, right? So one of the things we focused a lot on since we've kind of become an independent company is how do we help gain better insights for ourselves and to allow us to do a better job on behalf of our customers, but more importantly, to provide insights to our customers directly. Right. So even in cases where we may not be managing their entire estate, we're leveraging technology today that can look across their entire estate. And we can say, we think there's going to be a problem. I know you don't see it yet because it's not creating any symptoms, but it's coming.

8:38Right. And and we can look at repetitive patterns. We can, you know, use things like what we call AI ops, which is basically keeping an eye on all of your technology estate. And we can start to look for trends and we can look for, you know, possible problems coming before they come. Right. It's a way for us to avoid downtime or outages or bad things happening before they happen. And that's, you know, that has to be one of the great evolutions in the last number of years. in the technology world is that, you know, oftentimes in the past, you might not have known something was broken until it didn't work, right?

9:20And now there's usually signals if you have the technology to be looking at it and catch it. So we actually have, we call it Kindle Bridge. It's our sort of culmination of technology and AI ops and FinOps and other kinds of things that can look at the data across a customer's enterprise and can help us make proactive recommendations as opposed to reacting and waiting until something breaks and then it's kind of all hands on deck at two and three. That's kind of the old way. We want to continue to evolve past that. Yeah. Amy, tell me about who typically you start chatting with in organizations, right?

10:03So who should be really paying attention right now on the edge of their seat and then saying, I am so grateful I heard this conversation and, you know, heard the message that Amy was sharing. I really need to have a conversation with Kindrel. Yeah. Well, look, it's a mix. I mean, historically, it's been a lot of CIOs, right, chief information officers or even CTOs, chief technology officers. And that is still a core constituency for us, as well as chief security officers or anybody that's, you know, really in that security or cybersecurity space. But the other thing I would say that's really transpired over the last number of years is that there is a convergence between IT and the business, right?

10:44Most CIOs now are at the table with the CEO and the rest of the C-suite making business decisions because technology plays such a large role in how we do things, how we better serve our customers. It's very rare now that you see any separation between technology or the CIO's team and what's happening with the line of business execs, for example. And so we are really evolving with that. So yes, we want to continue to support CIOs and we work with them regularly, but we're also finding ourselves having more and more conversations with business execs who are trying to solve a business problem by using technology, right?

11:28So an example of that might be, you know, just this week in New York City was what they call MRF, which is a retail conference for retailers across the world. But it's a conference that happens every year to talk about, you know, innovation and retail, for example. And, you know, one of the things that we've specifically been working on is how do you better, you know, sort of enable the frontline worker, right? So in an industry like retail, the frontline worker, the person in the store that's in front of me as a customer or the agent that's talking to me through the online purchasing or even the frontline worker in a distribution center, that was kind of an overlooked IT user for a long time.

12:17IT was kind of this thing in a data center or it was kind of this big enterprise level view. But now if you can put insights into the hand of that person that's closest to your customer and you can do that real time and you can help them to be able to answer a customer's questions so they don't walk away without borrowing something, that's a win for a retailer. right? If you can do things like electronic shelf labels, which I know seems small, but if you've ever been in any kind of retail store, there's a lot of them that still do physical stickers. That takes a person to walk around and change every physical sticker.

12:57And it doesn't give the retailer the ability to modify the price as demand fluctuates, for example. So So if you can have that all become based on technology, then you have a lot more accuracy. You have a lot more flexibility to change the pricing. And so we don't make the labels, but we partner with a company that does. And that's just one thing that you can do to sort of help on the front line. So, you know, it's an evolution, I think, in the technology world in general, and certainly for us and Kendall, of how do we get out of kind of just the, you know, the data center world of operating these really big computers and machines and things, but that are still vital, by the way, but then how do we take technology?

13:46Because we all use it every day, right? We all walk around with a phone that we barely take our eyes off of all day. So, you know, you now have workers, again, in a store who are used to that in their personal life. How do you enable them to use that same kind of technology in their work life as they're trying to serve customers. And so those are the kinds of things that we're trying to think more broadly about, you know, beyond just sort of that enterprise level, you know, managing really big systems is how do you make an impact to your customer's customer more directly? So, yeah. You know, one final thing I just wanted to ask you about, Amy, as kind of an aside.

14:26Right. Kindrel's done some really good, like I can see this in the messaging is just like really tied into the brand. And it looks like you're personally a fan of, you know, kind of the inclusion, diversity and equity work that Kindrel's committed to. Would you mind just, you know, kind of editorializing or kind of sharing your perspective on this? Yeah, well, I mentioned, you know, kind of at the top, Josh, that, you know, as you become a new company, you have to find your own identity. Right. So there's a lot of work on culture that has to happen. And and we decided from day one to heavily invest in what is this culture going to look like?

15:04And it was everything to do with our people. Right. And a technology services company, your people are your asset. They are your everything that's good about the company is your people and their skills and their experience and their expertise. and you know it makes it even more important to make sure that they are every single person is part of building the culture and feels like it's a culture that's inclusive for them right and it again was a priority from day one and and we've done a lot of things in regard to this so we really said okay who do we want to be how do we want to act how do we want to act with each other as well as how do we want to act with our customers.

15:48And we named it, right? We have books that say, like, these are our leadership behaviors. This is how we're going to act. We all have this agreement with each other that this is who we want to be. I recognize people for those behaviors. They're nominated by their peers when they exhibit those behaviors. And then we honor them quite publicly across the team of, you know, these are people to emulate, like these are people who really are living these values and leadership behaviors every single day. You know, I think the fact that it's sort of peer nominated also goes to the fact that everybody's in, right?

16:30Everybody's saying, yes, that's an example of what we all aspire to be. And I think, you know, for me, that's the most incredible part. I mean, I could give awards out and I could have it sort of be chosen by me, but it's so much more valuable and important when it's really from the ground up and people say, yes, that's a leader. That's somebody who's living our culture. And so for me, that's been exciting to watch that sort of groundswell. And we have a number of other ways that we really try to take more of a sort of bottoms up approach, which is we have what we call Kindle Inclusion Networks.

17:11Right. And these are volunteer jobs. So we have leaders that lead these groups. We have participants. We have allies that are members of these groups. And these really represent a number of different, you know, sort of inclusion groups, right? So my leader for Kendrell for what we call affectionately our beacon, which is the Kendrell inclusion network for our black community and allies, you know, is, is a strong leader that pulls everybody together, but he doesn't run the show, right? he he's there as a sponsor as a guide as a voice in the community but the work and the activities and what's important to us and how do we want to pull people together and who do we want to highlight and do we want to invite people to speak all of that is really a grounds up effort by that team and again that's something people choose to be a part of it's not a requirement It's, you know, there's no rule that says you have to be part of any of them.

18:14But we have people that are part of many of them, right? Whether as, you know, identifying as part of a particular community or just being an ally and wanting to support in whatever way they can. So we also have what we call our cultural ambassador network. This is another kind of grounds up approach. These are people who've raised their hand and said they want to spread the word and they want to lead sessions about who we are and the culture and how we're going to treat each other and how we show up for each other every single day. So all of that has been such a joy for me to watch because I don't think this would have worked if we had tried to do all of these things tops down.

18:59And I absolutely know we would not have had a successful transformation if we hadn't had the people with us. Right. So, you know, for me, probably the most telling and rewarding and humbling evidence is, you know, in our engagement scores, you know, to the top three for my team are I feel respected at work. and number two which always makes me um feel very humbled is i feel i can show up as my whole self every day yeah yeah you know for me there's nothing more important than that is that people feel they can show up as their whole selves and if they feel that they want to be part of it and they want to help it grow and flourish and that's the only way we've made the progress both in our culture as well as in our business, quite frankly, is because we had everybody with us and feeling like they were part of it.

19:58You know, here we have, you know, probably the most tech of tech companies. Obviously, you're dealing in a lot of AI. But yet, at the end of the day, this is a human company working with humans and impacting the lives of humans. So I really appreciate that. Amy Oslocedo, we have about 20, 30 seconds left. The website, kindrel.com, K-Y-N-D-R-Y-L.com. When people go to your website, what would you recommend they do if they say, you know what, I'm familiar, maybe they've stumbled upon this podcast as a part of their researching Kindrel, and now they've heard our conversation. Where do they go from here?

20:36Yeah. So look, I think if they go to the website, one of the things they can do is look at some of these customer stories. I just talked about some of them, but, you know, I think those will continue to sort of solidify what we do and give them real examples. And then they can easily reach out to us directly from the website. There's, you know, a way to do that. Either you can pick up the phone and call us if you want to do a kind of old school style, or you can send them a message via email. But I would love to talk to anybody who would like to follow up on this conversation. Yeah. All right.

21:11Amy Salcedo, again, present. Kindrel, you asked. Amy, thank you so much for joining us. I loved the conversation. Yeah, thank you, Josh. It's been great. I appreciate it.

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