all right welcome to another episode of Glide chat today with me I have uh buddy Hanrahan the CIO of Department of livestock in Montana buddy how you doing today I'm doing well Michael it's great to meet you yeah thank you yeah thank you for having me on yeah this is great and uh first uh uh buddy why don't you tell us a little bit about uh your background you know how you got into into your position I know a lot of people strive to get to that CIO uh role so love to hear about your background and a little bit how you got here today sure I appreciate the opportunity so uh kind of stepping back a little bit uh left high school and joined the military right away spent 20 years most working mostly heavy aircraft B-52s as electronic warfare so you know Electronics related there was a lot of computer involvement in that came out of the military started an I.T business then moved that to Montana after I retired from the military and back to home I was I was born and raised here then I turned found a great job with the state uh ended up working entry level it was a help desk job I love helping people I love being one-on-one making those calls getting those calls and that that quickly turned to supervision and uh have been striving to work myself into a CIO position that the department of livestock position came open and I was selected and unbelievable walked into uh hey we need to do things better yeah and uh here's a here's some money to do it with so we started this project and uh I think we're making really I think we're making really good progress with this so excited to chat it up yeah no and you know it's funny I did help desk for five years so I definitely know the the ups and downs of help desk has actually just presented to a group of students that are about to intern into new help desk positions there's a lot of repetitiveness of you know answering that phone and you know sometimes I'm upset customers there but you know there's so much gratification of when you're solving someone's problem right and like you know just that you know immediate gratification of just you know rapid fire problem solving right um that I loved about help desk yep first call complete uh when we started tracking that uh yeah you know we we walked I walked into a situation where they weren't really tracking anything that they did and we started started doing that and they're like really you're complete eating 85 percent of the help desk calls on the first call like yeah yeah it's it's unbelievable when you start you know slicing and dicing the numbers too for sure and it's so easy to track you just kind of have to put that flag in there just to track it right yeah yeah um that's awesome so got some money to do a project and uh I assume that project involves servicenow it does involve service now yeah we uh we entered into a project trying to kind of modernize how we're doing brand inspection brand enforcement in the state of Montana so that includes drawing and registering of all the brands that was the Baseline of this to get those brands in the system and then taking that and putting the inspection portion on the back side of it so you know most people have seen Yellowstone yeah it's saying this I'm like oh they they bring the people yeah I can tell you for sure it's absolutely nothing like the show okay there's very few similarities we do not are are investigators do not carry ARS okay good they are armed they are law enforcement but they don't carry ARS okay um but no we we decided that that we've used paper long enough it's time to get to a process that's done that can be done electronically we're working that into this with a the mobile app and it's also on the servicenow platform and taking that and giving them that capability is game changing yeah moving from a backlog of paper because we have 13 or more investigators in the state but we have several hundred Deputy inspectors yeah so those are just common people that are trained and authorized to inspect cattle and they do it on paper and they send it in and we're taking all of that stuff and getting it to where they can do it electronically and make it more real-time which helps us with the law enforcement aspect the health aspect there's just it's kind of landmark you know I've used that term with the team and the team the team's like well yeah that kind of makes sense this is a landmark initiative application initiative yeah it really is because it's not just Benchmark we're not taking something and that already really exists and make it better we're doing this from scratch yeah that's amazing so just like it just take a step back like the regulations for and we don't I don't have a two fired on that path but like basically every P every cattle in the state of Montana has to be registered with the state and branded is that is that like the requirement or what are they inspecting what is it that they're tracking with servicenow you know I'm I'm not the total expert on that one we do have a brand we have a brand administrator that does his job but uh yeah the law requires that if you have a brand in the state of Montana it has to be registered and purchased basically we do conflict checks on those to make sure that the brands on the cattle in this County don't conflict with the brands on the back County and uh you know the families have several usually families have several Brands so the livestock are branded and the brands are separated by species oh wow okay so I don't know horse you know horse brand you can have the same brand on a horse as you can on a cow we register them by position so where they're located on the animal uh it's actually a fairly complex listed you can you could verify that with your team but it's a fairly complex list of things that have to take place so that you know whose brand is whose um yeah not not all livestock are required to be branded There are rules for that which ones have to which ones don't have to Montana is unique that they have per capita yep so that's you know the the owners of the livestock pay annually based on how many they own at a certain time of year ah okay so it's for tax implications as well so wow so you guys are managing this whole entire process and service now going from paper to to digital what do you see it going in the future because you I'm sure you always wanted to keep improving um how are you using it so what what what's kind of next on the roadmap so this whole digital process once we have that data we're working trying to get that data integrated with our Animal Health portions so Import and Export requires a Veterinary certificate in in and out of the state of Montana that's one of our requirements uh stats a safety you know Animal Health and Human safety because there are some diseases that are transmutable so it's kind of the first step in a very much larger picture yeah uh you know when you're working with paper there's that delay of how long does it take for the paper to get mailed in then put into a system to track it if we do that some things we do most things we do but there's some that we don't we're bringing them into this new from paper so it makes things a lot faster and I think what's really going to happen is we're going to be able to really have a good picture of what we actually do in Montana yeah yeah I think right now they have a good idea but it's going to be very specific and very quick we'll be able to see what's going on it'll help with you know the animal health thing really is where we're leaning after and for after the law enforcement the brand enforcement portion that's amazing because in in that owns like full circle back to like your help desk days right of like if we're not tracking it if we're not reporting on it how do we know exactly what's going on instead of counting pieces of paper let's let's put it let's let's put it all digitize it put it all in a system and then we can run nice clean easy reports to actually track and see you know what what's going on right inventory and uh and I love that you know I just love the fact um I love to see these unique cases where you know servicenow doesn't have an app built out of the box for this right obviously some personalization some development had to happen to build this and for for you to be brave enough to say yes servicenow is that application development can can happen in a nice clean way which is a market I mean you're a market leader right I don't think I haven't heard of any other states uh uh using service now to do this so this is pretty exciting right yeah we are leading the way on this we're hoping that a few States follow through you know the the knowledge presentation this year is going to be huge I think they're going to that be some realizations made there of what can actually happen with this yeah I can't do that I'm excited about it I I I've seen the the slides for the slide deck for it and had a little input with that I unfortunately do not get to make it to to knowledge uh David the conflict in the internally and just Manpower wise I can't get out so ah yeah but we're saying we'll record it for you yeah we're trying to get people we're sending good people so that's great and uh and so obviously uh glad fast was a big big part of uh implementing this with you what what what did you like working about with glide fast or you know would you work with us again I guess just just for maybe some advice for other customers out there sure yeah I appreciate that I appreciate that you know and this has been great to try and take something that like I said this was never done this way we do have a program that we currently use it's just not anything that can be done mobily it's not the data extraction from it is incredibly difficult and it's also end of life so we really didn't have a choice we had to move to something else and we picked this platform partially because the extended cost is going to be a little less since we are our servicenow state we have the platform to work on and will I work with glide fast again I'm sure it will because I really love this team we've lost some great people on the team and I still communicate with them as well because it's just family and really become part of the family I talked to I talked to the PM every single day yeah it's not a day that goes by I don't talk to him so that's great I'd love to hear that and yeah like I mean that's that's what we strive for right we built we become part of your team part of your family and it's like a war in a lot of ways right it's a battle where we're trying to figure out all the data we're trying to you know get people on board with the change that's happening and get people excited about it and um and obviously make the make it the best experience and the interface and you know um so there's always a lot of moving pieces to the puzzle you know I know we only have a few minutes here left you know buddy what what's some advice maybe you could give some of our other other people striving to get to that next level Maybe some people on the help desk world trying to because a lot of people men would I'll tell you it would look up to you and say wow you went from help desk to CIO that's a story you don't hear too often so I'd love to get some advice from you for for other people trying to get to that next level I appreciate that so for me it's got to be communicate and that in state government can be a challenge I'll be honest there's a lot of moving pieces in state government we have 30 plus departments to try and work around with each other and get to get to the right answer at the right time does it involve more than one agency can we make something work across the board you know in the case of working with glide fast to do something for brand enforcement not a whole lot of interaction with other agencies there is a little of revenue revenue gets involved with the per capita so there is some data sharing that's going to happen there that'll make life a lot easier for everybody uh but communicate with each other talk about your problems get them down you know you kind of have to plan from your level so in my limited experience I've been doing this for two and a half years but in that amount of time I've learned that I really need to have my goals and objectives square and know where I want to go but then I need to communicate that up the chain and say okay these are the things that I'm looking at and get the other departments to do the same so that we know what they're looking at and we're finding that 35 to 50 percent of what we're doing somebody else is doing something similar yeah permits you know we start talking about well we need to start integrating permits well I have three or four other organizations that do permit yeah so hey let's let's bring them on board and do it one time instead of doing it once here and then once there and then you know and and then having different processes as well yep and it's good for you guys it's you know the the contractor side it's good that they can come in and meet all those needs at once it's good for the state because there's a significant cost reduction when you do that when you can collaborate with other compartments so um communicate with each other and that's really I would say probably the key to what's made us successful love to hear that buddy thanks for joining us on episode of Glide chat make sure you follow us on LinkedIn And subscribe to us on YouTube and uh have a great day [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music]