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Craig Durr
I bet you've got somebody like this in your life. It's that one person, no matter what the problems are that come their way. They reply with typically two words. What if? Well, I want to introduce you to one of the people in my life that's like that to his name is Aaron Rowe. Now, Aaron works for Deloitte Consulting Deloitte. He works for the office of the CTO and his title is managing director of product and solutions. The thing I love about Aaron is that he doesn't let problems get him off track. He likes to look at what's going on, find those friction points, and help solve what's going on. In fact, it's not just when one What if comes up, but when multiple questions comes up, he really shows and shines and went to great examples. Aaron was heavily involved in what was called Deloitte University based in Dallas, Texas. Deloitte is this incredibly beautiful training campus for Deloitte employees. And the technology that's infused throughout is amazing. Second thing, he actually was a leading influencer on a application that Deloitte put together called Deloitte Magnet. This is actually the integration of presence and space of individuals within smart buildings. We have some of these applications in the market now. But this actually came to market within Deloitte, five, six years ago. So he was way ahead of the curve on that. This is one of the fun conversations I enjoy having talking what if with Aaron row
Craig Durr
My name is Craig Durr, I work as a researcher and analyst in the field of workplace collaboration. Now, I'm in this great spot where not only do I get to consult with the companies that produce the technologies and devices and the services that enable workplace collaboration. But I also get to talk to the end customers, and then even the channel partners that are helping to try and figure out the solutions to the problems people are seeing in their workplace environments, the use cases, the challenges, the things that just aren't working, right. It's a great place to be. I like the idea that I get to help bridge what takes place between end users and the companies that are making the solutions. So why not? Let's talk more about it. In fact, let's talk about collaboration. All right. Hey, everyone. How you doing? This is Craig Durr. I am here to talk about collaboration with my good friend Aaron row from Deloitte. Aaron, how you doing? Doing?
Aaron Roe
Good, Craig, good to see you, man.
Craig Durr
So I'm still chuckling because just now in the greenroom, I was telling asking you to explain to me your title. And as I My eyes were glazing over, you had this really funny. This is my unofficial title. Will you share that unofficial title again? I think that's a great idea.
Aaron Roe
Yeah. So my elevator pitch is my role is to be the chief problem solver for our IT organization. So you take you take anything that seems like the most complex problem, people would run away from, and that's when I get excited. I'm like, All right, you know, basically can't be faceless configured. So
Craig Durr
I love it. I love it. Actually, Aaron, let's give some history. You and I actually met each other at this point in time, it was probably about gosh, I almost want to say seven, eight years ago, when I was leading a product management team at Polycom. And we had a chance to visit Deloitte University when you guys called D you down in Dallas. It was a beautiful facility. Tell me about that facility again. And what you did to build out there you were very proud of that. And still wonderful facility.
Aaron Roe
I'm still proud of it. And when I walk in, it's like, yeah, this is this is my home. So the university I'll give you the high level City, it was 600,000 square feet, 800 classrooms. 30% 800 guest rooms, 35 classrooms. A ballroom, a junior ballroom, five star restaurant and resort. So you know, if you think about it is it's a resort that no one else can go through. Thanks for calling. Yeah, so the best resort no one will ever be able to attend or something like that. And then since then, so that was 11 years ago, specifically that we opened it. And since then, we've started a new expansion. So 600,000 more square feet. 600 classrooms, 600 guest rooms, and 24 classrooms. Wow. So if you think about it, and you remember it, so it was roughly a quarter mile long from one end to the other. Yeah. You know, we're going to be roughly seeing a I would guess a mile long building.
Craig Durr
That is, here in Austin, the Tesla cyber factory is coming up. That's a mile long to walk. But what was beautiful about that was you were so passionate about the collaboration technology that we signed. That's where you and I connected. Everything from when you first walked in and you had that video wall that I can't remember how long it was, but it was incredibly long and interactive to what
Aaron Roe
It was the largest medial wall in North America. Wow, when we opened up the facility, I was so proud of that. Then we got into the classroom environments because the purpose of this is to bring in the employees, junior associates, and new associates and help train them on how Deloitte works and how to use it for Tiger team projects and war room projects. So you had this amazing network of collaboration devices. The rooms were actually impressive because you are dealing with traditional conference rooms that had one camera and one speaker, one microphone, multipurpose rooms, wood moveable walls, and movable technology. And I felt at that point in time, you personally were the cutting edge person, really seeing what the future can hold for collaboration, and it was really powerful at that time.
Aaron Roe
Yeah, we always set the set. We always set out to set the bar high. And what's expected. What's interesting about those those rooms was, they were never intended to be a video, they were always intended to be an in person experience. However, fast forward to the pandemic, we had to really change up what we were doing, how we were thinking, how we would, you know, do those same in person sessions with a remote audience. And so a lot of the technology we put in there was used for those reasons, we also put that technology in knowing that we may need guest speakers come in, who couldn't travel. You know, and we've, we've done a number of those from, you know, Iceland into the EU type experiences. So Right.
Craig Durr
You know, I, in my mind, you are what I call the what if guy, you look at these problems, like you said, and you say yeah, but But what if, what if I could bring in this person remotely to help educate this group of 3040 50? Professionals? What if I can move that wall? And then the back end for all our Pro AV audience geeks that might be watching, you're like, what if I can run this all to a single closet all on one floor and manage it remotely from you know, a state away or a country like that? It was some pretty phenomenal stuff.
Aaron Roe
Yeah. And we're actually doing that now. Right? They were really thinking forward. On. If you think about those older rooms of the bill, every room had erected equipment. Yeah, six feet seven feet tall. Yep, needed his own power, it needed its own air conditioning, those type of things. You know, now we're really thinking software. What can we do with software? How can we leverage software. And so we've actually prototype this product through. And we believe what we know, it's not to believe, we know we can deliver three multipurpose classrooms with one rack of equipment. We believe we can deliver all 24 new classrooms with one rack of equipment. However, I still have business continuity and other things. So I'm going to settle at, you know, three classrooms with one rack of equipment. Yeah, with a goal of you know, hey, let's let's really think forward what what that could be done.
Craig Durr
I mean, this is where you and I were sitting down at Enterprise Connect, you're like, Craig, I'm thinking about this in a software defined network kind of mindset. And you were taking this other technology concept and trying to apply it here to these distributed collaboration things. Well, hold on. I want to pause a second we're diving in. And I need to have people understand who is Aaron Rowe? How did you come to become this curious, well informed guy who has access to these resources, take these What if moments and really explore with them? That's the cool thing.
Aaron Roe
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you think about way back my background, before I joined Deloitte, I was one of the core team members that built the first telepresence product. Wow. You know, right. So we built our product, starting in the 90s, with Scott and Rebecca, David, and the whole idea was really like, how do we take this in person session and make it feel like through technology? We're in the Samer? Yeah. So if you remember those days when we launched telepresence, that was a needed problem, like prior to that video conferencing lived on a 27 inch tube TV did not a flat panel. Right. So I'm dating myself and my hair, probably dating myself as well. So I'm allowed to now. Right? You know, the cameras weren't great. Everything was standard definition. And now, we bring forward telepresence, and not only that, we bring forward telepresence High Definition came in at that time. So we sold that company to Polycom 2007. And then from that point forward, I started helping service providers figure out how they're going to manage and how they're going to support telepresence, right was my client through all of this and, and I was working at Nortel at the time, we know that story how that plays out. I said, I'm not going to follow you to another company, we need video conferencing fixed. And they brought me on board to fix it, if you can believe it, that was 15 years ago. So I've been with Deloitte 15 years, and I've started with let's fix video conferencing to need you to now deploy Skype, and then I need you to deploy email on the cloud. And it's just kind of continued to grow from there. And so you know, I would just say, give me the hardest, most complicated problem and run with it. And that's what we've done.
Craig Durr
That's perfect. I love it. I love the fact that you are so passionate about what you're solving what you're figuring out. Now, let's talk about the premise of what we're talking about the show here is the idea that people like yourself sit in this great spot, in between your end users, that your stakeholders, your clients, your customers, and those vendors as well, too. And let's define this, you mentioned something to me really interestingly, is that you've been having so much success internally at Deloitte, that they've turned to you and said, Hey, we need to take some of these solutions you're putting in place for us and help us do it for our Deloitte clients as well, too, right? So your your user base of the problems you're trying to solve the benefits you're delivering is not just the Deloitte employees, but it was even being some of their clients and customers to into these most multinational companies.
Aaron Roe
Yeah, absolutely. You know, there's, there's several advisory boards I sit on my role, I believe my role on those advisory boards is to challenge the suppliers to think for right. I believe customer experience is paramount. And so I mean, every organization is upgrading customer experience officers focusing on what's the experience for our clients, what's the experience for internal clients, even in our IT organizations? Right now we're creating a CXO focused on what will the internal experience be across all of technology for Deloitte internally? So when I'm talking to our clients, and we're talking through their problems, you know, a lot of times they want to go straight into what's the right hardware answer? Yeah. What's the right platform? Answer? Right, like, and you can take me deep, and I can take them deeper, you know, on one versus the other. But the truth is, none of them when if people want to talk, yeah. And that's, that's kind of where I've come back to, when I look at, like, if we make a decision, we'll have the data, right? Doesn't show value back to our organization? Or does it show us you know, another element of technical debt that we're gonna have to manage, and three years from now,
Craig Durr
I love it.
Aaron Roe
Those are the key things I'm really thinking about as we go forward.
Craig Durr
So the idea when you're talking to these people is to put the technology aside. Are your end users going to pick it up? Are they going to make this part of their daily workflow? It's almost as if you're trying to say, think about this friction point. And does it solve the friction? Forget about what lubricant and oil I provide you? are we solving those friction points?
Aaron Roe
Yeah, absolutely. That's, that's the big one. Friction points is a great word. And I will probably start using it now that I've heard about it. You know, I always thought like barrier to entry, is kind of how I think like, how hard is it going to be to use? How easy is it going to be is, you know, will people use it? Or will they just ignore it? Yeah. And that's actually what drove our Magnet app that I showed you at Enterprise Connect.
Craig Durr
Glad you asked about that. I was gonna cue that up to talk about that in a second. But let me cue up how this came about. I was fortunate enough to be presenting an Enterprise Connect about something I call workplace experience. These are the platforms that are helping people bridge and remove those friction points. Open employees come in everything from reserving a conference room to a desktop, to seeing if someone is there on site that they want to meet with to other things and what I was talking to you about the presentation. And I said, "Look, there are some great solutions on Zoom. Microsoft is coming out with places and some other things." And you slyly pulled out your cell phone and said, Craig, you mean something like this? And you showed me something there. Tell me about that.
Aaron Roe
So like, I'm proud of Magna Carta, I've been part of that team, this focus. Here's the cool thing. We geofence all of our offices when I get within 25 feet of the office or maybe even closer, it welcomes me to the office. And that's, that's cool. And that was kind of our start, like let's let's start with, you know—
Aaron Roe
Let's just like let people know, it's our office. Now. It's my badge into the office. Yeah. You know, when I walk in the doors, you know, the first thing I do is wonder, "Where am I sitting at today?" And it tells me it says, "Hey, you're sitting here, but your friends are on this floor. Do you want to sit by them?" Right? And so it's those intuitive things like, "Hey, how do I know who my friends are?" It's a little creepy. Well, you're using some of the AI and some of our tools that we have available to us today to help us really identify like, who do you collaborate with on the most? Who are you emailing? Are you messaging and on your productivity apps and those type of things. And that actually, data helps you realize it? So I'll give you a story. I walked into Roslyn, which is an outside of Arlington, Virginia, walked into the Rosslyn office, open up the app, trying to figure out what floor we were going to as I'm walking to the floor, I'm looking to see who else was in the office, knowing that I've got friends that live in that area hoping they were in the office. Yeah. But what I found was two of my friends who live in Connecticut, were actually in the office on the holy cow and Beth and Rebecca in the office message, like, hey, guess what? I'm in the office? Do you guys want to grab coffee? You know what happened in that one, coffee break, nothing really cool. We solved some really complicated privacy problems that we were trying to figure out. That's perfect. I mean, like 15 minutes a collision, and we solve real world problems. Yeah. So those are, those are kind of the things that we look for in Magnum, we're magnets gonna go is going to launch our conference, you know, the, the tablet on the table will become a thing of the past Sunday, you know, people will walk in with their mobile device onto my meeting. And this device has all my identity. It's got my access management, it knows who I am. It knows how to gather my files that are stored in the cloud. And so essentially, my device becomes my key token to everything I need to do for me in the future.
Craig Durr
That's great. That's great. So in that own experience, here's an opportunity for you to sit back, let's talk about how you were kind of in those customer advisory roles, you found a problem and solution based upon your end users, you wound up mapping to a solution, there's probably some great lessons there. How would you share those lessons with other technology providers, vendors, and suppliers so that they can leverage them? I mean, did you start with a problem statement? Did you start with the idea of pure exploration and play and trying to figure out I've got this great technology? And I think I can pull some interesting things from how they come together.
Aaron Roe
Okay, so we looked at how many people use Uber? Yeah. At the time when we started building our product, right? You couldn't go anywhere without hearing about Uber, the best thing in the world, right? I don't have to get a taxi anymore. I don't have to call car services. You know, those were the at the time, but thinking right, like, what makes that product? So you know, attractive, right? Why is it so easy to use? You know, and then we were also looking at the adoption of our offices, you know, there are real problems that we were looking at, at the time, people were booking conference rooms, mostly because they didn't know where people were going to be, um, they would book a 20 person conference room for what actually needed three people on that one office and one person, you know, at the time, like seven or eight other offices. And so that was kind of the one problem we were looking at. Yeah. But that's, it's ultimately like, you know, how do we drive a great experience? How do we drive a great guest experience when they walk into our offices and we back into it from there, just really challenging ourselves to think through? What are the problems we're trying to solve? And then how do we leverage technology to maybe leverage technology to fix the answers? Not always?
Craig Durr
No, I'm sure it was one of being an iterative process. I mean, some, you know,
Aaron Roe
yeah. We've been using Magnet. Gosh, I will say five or six years now, a while. So, the product just continually evolves and grows. You know, it's one of several CIO boards, and I'm sure it'll continue as we continue to do the things we're doing with it. But it's definitely, you know, a whole product.
Craig Durr
I like that if I, again, I've already kind of given you a name to me, you're the what-if guy, and I think that's a little bit of like the art of the possibility that I think you can lend into some of these situations, you know, to that specific problem. This is the way I've been starting to talk about it. People are challenged with this term returned to the office. And I think the focus on the physical place is if that can be redefined. Some starting to educate people and say don't talk about it as return to the office. Talk to it about return in person. When and where do you want to meet in person with someone, and when and where will the office part fall into place? Naturally, offices wind up being a great asset for businesses for people to come and meet they can provide assets they can provide, you know, all the capabilities they need to make them productive, comfortable and what have you. So it's a natural answer there. But don't lead with that as the answer kind of going back to your idea it's what we want to return to in person. Collaboration. When's it important, and where should it take place? It sounds like that's a little bit of what you backed into there, too.
Aaron Roe
Yeah, you know, we've coined a couple of phrases as we thought about our offices.
Craig Durr
I love phrases.
Aaron Roe
Yeah, I mean, one, I don't know if we've officially adopted it or not. But what I like, is don't commute to compute. Yes, I heard that. Yeah. Like, if you're gonna save in your, you know, in your domain, and just, you know, on your keyboard all day long, you know, you probably don't need to go to the office. But at the same time, there's so much value in the collisions when you walk into the office. So we had a strategy session not too long ago, where we were taking all of it through, like really connecting them to the strategy. And we felt like it was important to bring them in. So we asked everybody to go to your local office. We hosted these meetings all over the major cities in the country, and then one virtual, okay? Here's the coolest thing that happened. I'm in the office. Leading the sessions, I'm seeing my friends that I haven't seen since before the pandemic, Greg, I mean, people were crying, really, we're talking about friends that didn't survive. That's awful. You know, those were the real things, right? But at the same time, we're talking about the happy moments with those people and what those people did, right. So, you know, there's smiles and tears and laughter. But then you walk down the hallway, and you bump into a friend, and you have that collision, not the one where you drop all the papers with the one where, hey, you haven't seen you in so long, what's going on? And you hear about that problem, like I was just talking to you about, you know, with Beth, right? When I saw them, we were able to identify a problem that we're trying to solve. We didn't plan to get coffee and talk about any problems; we plan to get coffee and talk and hang out, right, but, but those collisions that happen, and you think about, like pre-pandemic, when we were going to the office, that five minutes before the meeting started. You solve real problems. When everybody was like rushing from one end of the building to the other end of the building to get to that conference room. You had a conversation about life maybe it was a car, maybe it was about something else. But that conversation really connected you to the person, and now we live in this world where we're always disconnected, even though we're connected. Yeah, I call it disconnected mode, right? Because you get disconnected from the culture, you get disconnected from each other. Right? I also admit I like back-to-back Zoom meetings, Team meetings, Google meetings, or whatever else you're dealing with. And you're sitting there like one to another to another, you never have time. I mean, literally, sometimes you have to go. I just need five minutes to go to the bathroom. Right? The bio break.
Craig Durr
But But you're right. It's one of those challenges I think companies are tackling, and it sounds like you guys are making great progress. It's the softer skill sets around people working together. For me, I talk about it in terms of culture, and it sounds like that's what you're developing is the opportunity for people to connect on multi levels, multi facets, which actually make it a more enriching, rewarding experience. It's great. It's good. Well, we're at this interesting point in my conversation with you. This is where I go to my trusted talk show late night talk show host questions here. I don't know if I told you about this here or not. But I'm gonna hit you hard on this. Okay. I got three questions for you. These may or may not be serious questions, I can't be responsible for him because we had a an official writer over here, write them and send them over. His name is Chet and his last name is GPT. But this is what we're going to do. I've got some questions for you, I'm going to put you on the spot. And I want to know what you're thinking about top of your mind. You're ready. Here is the first question you're ready. What was the most creative virtual background you seen in a meeting? And did it spark inspiration for you? Or total disgust? What was that? What was that? That background? That really background?
Aaron Roe
You know, like, I didn't see it with my own eyes, but I saw the video. Someone created one have a image of themselves frozen, and change their name to connecting. It was actually I guess, a student in high school that did it. Yeah. So they could get out of class during the pandemic. So that's probably the answer. You know,
Craig Durr
I have a similar story. And I promise you this is a sincere story. My little one was in kindergarten when the pandemic started, and they were on a Zoom call, and the one thing that happened there is this all the little kids all you see is their nose coming over the edge, that's about all they could do. Well, these kids started figuring out that you on your iPad, you can click and you do a screen capture, they started putting up that image of the screen capture, so it looks like the kids are just sitting there paying attention in class. Meanwhile, they stepped away and went out of the house. It was, it was a similar thing there. Okay. All right. I like that one. We're gonna go here now. What? Ah, here it is okay. If you had a movie character, give a pitch for what you do at Deloitte. This is you, mister Problem Solver, Mr. FixIt. Mr. Wolf, Mr. Whatever name you want to be. Who would that movie character be capturing the essence of Aaron Roe at Deloitte?
Aaron Roe
I'm going to go dark from
Craig Durr
Back to the Future. You want to be the crazy wild-haired guy.
Aaron Roe
So when you don't have any hair so?
Craig Durr
Of course, Marty, we can do this. We can we can go through time. We just need to fix the flux capacitor. I kind of gave mine I think you're Mr. Wolf. I know it's a slightly different topic. But you're the FIX IT guy. We bring it in. You bring it in when you get things done. I don't know. Marty McFly. I can see that one. I can see that one, Doc. Okay. All right. Here you go. Last one. What is your one unspoken rule of when you're on a meeting? And you've broken it, but gotten away with it. So I'll give you what I mean by this as an example. People have often said I wear pajamas during my Zoom meetings and conference calls. And their one rule is don't stand up. So people see your pajamas. But they also stand up and see their pajamas. What is the one thing that you do right now in your virtual meetings? That you kind of have they're hidden away? There's something in front of you. Is there a cup of coffee? Are you jumping between meetings and going and jumping in the swimming pool there in Tennessee? What are you doing right now?
Aaron Roe
I have jumped in my swimming pool. What I asked my people to do is if you're going to join me, join and be attended to and engaged. I'm probably the biggest offender, and this is why I closed my laptop later. Right? Because if I leave it open, 200 messages is coming in from across the world right now. Like, hey, what's going on with this? What's going on with that? You know, I easily get distracted. So sometimes my rule is I closed my laptop and why I run my own video on a separate system is specifically for that reason so I can really keep the computing power of my laptop focused on what I needed to and keep video in a video specific place.
Craig Durr
That's that's a great example. Pardon me, I gotta finish this post here. I have real quick I'm sorry. No, I'm just kidding. Aaron Rowe. Thank you so much for your time. This has been great truly I do love your attitude. When you go into these conversations you and I, the the child like what if when you look at these problems, and the way that you bring together new ideas and solutions and and leverage your resources to bring it to bear is really inspirational. Thank you for sharing. I really appreciate it.
Aaron Roe
Sure. Thanks. Thanks. Great. Thanks. Alright,
Craig Durr
Everyone, take care. Next time we visit, we'll talk more about collaboration. We'll see you later. Bye.