United States | The Late Night Brew - Episode 1 (Nulia)

Robert Buktenica - 04.05.202020200504

The Late Night Brew – Episode 1 (Nulia)

The Late Night Brew – Episode 1 (Nulia)

Welcome to our newest series – The Late Night Brew – where the brew review comes first, and business second.

Insentra Consultant Robert Buktenica (Aka Buck) discusses Insentra’s newest partner – Nulia with our very own CEO Ronnie Altit.

TRANSCRIPTION

Robert Buktenica: Hello, everyone, welcome to the first night of late-night brew with the crew. I am Robert Buktenica, affectionately known as Buck, because no one could spell or pronounce my last name. On our first episode, we have a very special guest, Ronnie Altit, CEO. We are here to talk about our newest partner, and honestly, a really really cool technology, Nulia Works. 

Ronnie, I hope you have yourself a good brew for tonight, I have mine. 

Ronnie Altit: I do, I’m having an Ouzo. 

Robert: An Ouzo, I remember, I got introduced to that when I was working as a valet at a Greek restaurant. The owner thought it was fun to give everyone Ouzo shots.

Ronnie: I’m a big fan of Ouzo, a big big fan. My family used to drink Ouzo. Ever since I was a little kid, my dad would have an Ouzo or a scotch after work, and once I got to a certain age, I was always allowed to have a sip, so I acquired a taste for it. I do enjoy drinking an Ouzo.

Robert: I appreciate it too; once I learned how to drink it properly. Drink the shot, I would not recommend. 

Ronnie: Not the drink you want to shot. Isn’t it cool though, how when you put an ice cube into Ouzo, it changes color from clear to a whiteish?

Robert: Cloudy.

Ronnie: Yes, there is a chemical reason for that which I won’t bore you with.  

Robert: Maybe on another episode we’ll get into that. I decided to go unique, for something new. It’s a limited release, Upslope Boulder Colorado Tea Shandy. It’s an ale with black tea and lemon. It’s dangerous because it tastes like a little bit of a strong black tea with a bit of lemon, and it goes down very very smooth. 

Ronnie: I think that might be part of their strategy. 

Robert: It’s working for them; I’ll give them that. 

Ronnie: There you go. 

Robert: Nuilia, what are they trying to achieve?

Ronnie: Well, how do I answer that in a nutshell. I think what they’re really doing is they’re revolutionising digital enablement, the approach taken to digital enablement starting with the Office 365 platform. Obviously, before we decided to take them to market we did a whole lot of market research, as everyone would expect we should do. [We] haven’t found anything that does what they do. Nothing that I’ve seen does what they do the way they do it. It’s really quite a special platform. 

Robert: I would totally agree. I’ve been O365 consultant for six, seven years and the biggest question I’ve always been asked is how do we prove this is worth it? How do we prove people are using it? I think Nulia solves that and gives that validity to it. 

Ronnie: A hundred percent right because anybody who’s putting in Office 365, it’s the whole story, you can have these wonderful productivity gains, you’ll be able to use Teams and you can chat and you can video like we are today. You can share spirals and you can share your screen, and present online and create channels and have all the files in one place. Then people can use OneNote and take notes, et cetera, and companies go, “Yes, that sounds really cool stuff. I’ve got my licenses anyway; I might as well buy these 365 licenses.” 

They buy E1s, E3s, E5s, whatever it is, you know, M1s, et cetera. They go, “Right, cool, let’s do active directory and let’s do mail.” That’s easy, because most people know how to use Mail, most people know how to use Outlook, that’s easy. When it comes to the rest of the productivity suite, we always hit this barrier. There’s a few that come up, but one of the big barriers is, how do I actually train my people?

Not only, how do I know if they’re using it? But how do I enable them in such a way that they’ll use the platform? And then how do I know that even once I’ve done it, they are using the platform? That’s sort of the big problem. The whole Prosci ADKAR model is great, but once you’ve got the knowledge out there, it’s the next bit, it’s the reinforcement. It’s the A and the R that’s in ADKAR, that’s the struggle, and Nulia just nails it. It nails that.

Robert: It does both the training and the enablement all in one. You don’t have to worry about picking up a stiff product.

Ronnie: Yes, and I call it training, right? Because it is enablement and it’s just providing them the information they need. Let’s just talk about what it does. You have the problem that people have. Typically, they’ll go down this change management path, which is very valid. It has its place, no question. They create change champions in the company.

They do lunch and learn sessions and put flyers up in bathrooms, and on walls in kitchens, “Hey, Teams is coming. This is coming” build some momentum, build some hype. They’ll do lunch and learns, train the trainers, have specific people doing floor walking, FAQs so they can leave on desks or drop in emails, et cetera.

They do all of that, and they go, “Right, I hope people got that. I hope they’re using it.” Really, anything else becomes kind of anecdotal. It looks like people are using Teams a lot more to create chats. Yes, but are they sharing files? Are they collaborating on files together? I wonder what they’re doing, I don’t know? 

The thing about Nulia is it’s also finding out where people are at. It’s not just about new deployments, it’s about, we’ve had this in place for a while, let’s put Nulia in and let’s actually understand at a granular level what people are able to do. When I say, granular, I mean, “Can I use @ mentions in Teams,” and are they using @ mentions? Not, are they using Teams for voice and for chat? Are they actually able to use @ mentions? 

Do they know how to use meet now; do they know how to set up a meeting? Are they setting up a meeting, so we can profile them and get a baseline? And then, what we can do is target the enablement and the learnings based on what they don’t know how to do, because nobody wants to be trained and sit in the training room to be taught something that they already know.

That’s why they tune out, and likely, stay tuned out for the stuff that we really wanted to tell them anyway. I think, the critical thing is now we’ve trained them on and given them the enablement and the learnings on what they need to do, the ability to immediately go and try it, and then, to not be given any accreditation until they use it. That’s awesome, right? 

It’s like, you can do all the training you want, until you start using this function, we aren’t giving you any accreditation for this. More the point, if you stop using this function, we’re going to call you out because now you need to put attention back on to this. Which is the important thing too, because we get excited then we go, “Oh my Lord, there’s a new feature. I want to start using it.”

You start using it, and it’s like, “This is really cool,” but nobody else around you is using it, so [then] you’re like, “Yes, that was cool,” when you figure it out, you go back to the day-to-day. Nulia stops this. Which is why , I think the platform’s phenomenal.

Robert: Absolutely, since we introduced it, I have found myself throughout the week going in and seeing what progress I have made. It’s not even like I have to create a task or reminder of, “Go check this.” It’s more like, “How am I doing? What haven’t I done yet?” 

Ronnie: Just in case you forget, it’s going to send you an email, anyway and tell you, “Hey, here’s where you’re at.”

Robert: Yes, the ‘Your week in Nulia’ or ‘Your work week’, I think, is what it is. 

Ronnie: Yes, I was amazed when I first got into the platform and I was like, “Oh, I have 26 skills.” I said “Oh, isn’t that cool?” How cool is that? Then I went through the platform and I’m like, “What are the skills I don’t have? Come on, what’s going on here?” I just got interested to go and educate myself on stuff.

If there was stuff which I was like, “I really want to know how to do that.” There it was, I could easily go and learn it, and consume it in three minutes  a two or three-minute video, and I’m like, “That’s what you’re going to do.” Or, I could take the same piece of learning I needed and I’m like, “I don’t want to watch video, just give me the step-by-step. I just want to quickly, step-by-step.” Having the different types of enablement there as well, to cater for different learning styles, which is pretty powerful too.. 

Robert: Yes, it speaks a lot, because as you said, the enablement sessions, if you lose somebody in the beginning, you’ve lost them. Maybe that session isn’t good for them, maybe they’re more interactive, maybe they are more of a video person.

Ronnie: They may love traditional things. 

Robert: Yes, they have each of those for them. It caters to almost all of the potential ways of how someone needs to learn or could learn. It really is great for that. I’ve got to say I love the rethinking of the term training to enablement. I think that’s a powerful mindset because– maybe, it’s just me, but there’s almost a stigma on training of, “I got training, I got to learn.”

How about, “Yes, I’m going to go enable myself to go do this, I’m going to go and enable someone else to be better, to be more productive.” I’ve got to say, I love that, I’ve got to call it out. It is a fantastic mindset switch.

Ronnie: I can’t own that. That’s what the whole platform is, the digital enablement platform.  I can’t own that, but it had a profound effect on me when I started thinking about it too. If you know, it’s the instinct thing as well, we’ve brought a number of different products into market over the time, over ten years that we’ve been in existence.

It’s the only, the first and the only product, pretty much… well, there was another one we did that Microsoft bought, FSLogix, that had a really strong value proposition as well which people gravitated to. This is the one which I’m so passionate about it. I do a lot of demos myself. It’s like, “Why is a CEO doing demos so often? I just think it’s such a great platform.”

I’ve probably done forty or fifty of these demonstrations. Every single person, bar one, just one person said, actually two. Two people said, “Not so sure,” but that was because they couldn’t work out how to make it fit within their business from a partner perspective. 

Every other person that I’ve demoed it to was like, “Wow, this is amazing. This is absolutely incredible. I can’t believe that nobody else has thought of this,” and that’s when you know you’re on a good idea. When somebody says, “I wish I would have thought of that,” that’s a great idea, and it’s going to be something else. 

It’s just incredible to see the take up, and then with the partners that we demonstrated to, we’ll demonstrate it to a partner, and they’re coming back to us saying, “Hey, we want to get this going. Get us some licenses. We want to get this in market,” so, that doesn’t happen with too many products.

Robert: Right, and those are both, would you say, that runs the gamut of new Office 365 customers to existing customers who have been in there for years and feel like they know it. 

Ronnie: Yes, absolutely. It’s not just even new versus old or new versus… erm..  

Robert: Established.

Ronnie: Yes, established is a good word. It’s also, knows no bounds in terms of scale. It’s equally valid for a five or ten-user organization. In fact, the first sale we did a five-user sale. It’s equally valid for five users as it is for 500,000 users.

The interesting thing too is that for those who are established, let’s say they have gone down the whole adoption change management path and they have created and done all of the lunch and learn trainings and all the things I spoke about, what happens when they hire new people? What happens to the next intake of people into their organization? How are they keeping them enabled? How are they ensuring that they’re leveraging the toolsets properly?

The fact that the platform is ever-green and it continually gets new learnings put into it, so that people can continue to upskill and up enable, we should say. That’s also really powerful as well. With those that have had this in place for a long time, they’re almost easier because we would have in place long time when we know we hardly use any other. 

The ones who are putting it in are like, “We know we’re not using much of it if we don’t enable people properly,” and this is the way that we can do it in a fun way. Yes, you can gamify the platform too, so it makes it fun as well. 

Robert: I love that too, that little bit of friendly competition of ‘I’ve gotten these many outcomes or these many skills, how many do you have?”

Ronnie: Yes, that happens internally with us. We’d set out that leader board and somebody came up and it’s, “I thought I was doing really well with my 25 skills, but everybody’s got 35. I’ve got to get in there and do some stuff.” 

Robert: A couple, Neil and Jade, they’re like, “Hey, how many points do you have?” 

Ronnie: How many points do you have? How many points have you earned?

Robert: Earned, that’s right.

Ronnie: Because you kind of earned. For example, for me, I’ve earned two and a half thousand points thereabouts, but I’ve spent eleven hundred. That’s because I’ve been upskilling myself, but it’s also when I’m doing demonstrations with people, I’m like, “Look, I can do this and it will cost me 25 points to do it.”

That ability not just to see how much you have earned, but also how much have you spent, speaks at how much you’re really investing in yourself too. You can not only be given a set of outcomes by your organization to deliver upon, but you can do those and go, “I don’t want to just be at a User level on this, I want to go to Producer or I want to go to Master, let me unlock that. I’m going to spend my points and unlock it.”

It’s great then for your manager or company to come back to those engagement points and see, “Hey, look at that, that persons earned a lot but they spent a lot on themselves.” I’m really looking at a lot of people like to see their crew investing in themselves. 

Robert: And the engagement, the continual, as you said, coming back to it. Coming back and seeing what else can I do, what else can I build on, what else can I get involved with. From what we have done, what would you say the feedback is on setting it up?

Ronnie: Piece of cake. The biggest questions are around what are the security [measures]? How does the security work in the data or who gets access to what data, and those sorts of things. But the setup, it’s literally, three or four minutes. It’s very very quick to add it into a tenancy and for it to start gathering data. Super super easy. 

There’s not even a lot of services that attach to this because once we enable an organization, show them how to use it, give them all the onboarding materials about how they can communicate, what are different ways they can gamify, et cetera, if there’s a champion within an organization, they could take it and run with it. Alternatively, our partners can run with it for them. We can run with it with our partners for the client, there’s lots of different ways.

Firstly, it’s not an expensive platform. Secondly, it’s not really services heavy. To me, I’m just like, “It’s a no brainer.”

Robert: The set-up is so quick. You’re not standing up servers, you’re not trying to build connectors.

Ronnie:  Yeah, and I know it sounds so easy, but it is. 

Robert: It’s easier than setting up AD connect, and that requires having a server and installing a platform and knowing what options. That’s a wizard that guides you too. 

Ronnie: It’s very very easy. It’s like any other good SAS platform, very simple, very easy to attach and highly valuable. 

Robert: Absolutely, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for enjoying the drink with me. I appreciate your time. If anybody has any questions, feel free to reach out to us, click the link, email me, robert.buktenica@insentragroup.com. Don’t worry about spelling it, it will be spelled out for you. Have a wonderful rest of your day and evening, cheers.

Ronnie: Cheers to you too, Rob.

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United States | The Late Night Brew - Episode 1 (Nulia)

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United States | The Late Night Brew - Episode 1 (Nulia)

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