Status Go: Ep. 228 – It is time for RPA? | Mike Gill and Jason Hines

Summary

In this episode of “Status Go,” host Jeff Ton and guests Jason Hines, and Mike Gill delve into the fascinating world of Robotic Process Automation (RPA). They discuss the benefits of RPA, such as automating repetitive tasks and streamlining workflows, and how it can free up valuable time for employees to focus on more strategic activities. The episode also explores the concept of a digital worker, how RPA integrates with other technologies like Gen AI and intelligent document processing, and the importance of employee well-being and work-life balance. With their wealth of experience in IT and manufacturing, the guests provide insightful perspectives on the evolving landscape of automation and its impact on businesses. So tune in for an engaging conversation that will inspire you to rethink traditional work practices and discover the immense potential of RPA in making work more valuable for individuals and companies alike.

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About Mike Gill

Mike Gill is the founder and President of 5 Rivers Automation, a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and data analytics automation solution provider focused on humanizing work.

Mike is an accomplished IT leader with over 20 years of delivering digital transformation while staying hands on with technology – still able to code and find his way around a server. He has led enterprise systems development, managed international delivery, and been CIO for global operations. Most of his experience has focused on Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) in the manufacturing industry.

Mike is passionate about coding – as a technologist delivering solutions, as a continuous learner, and as an expert teaching it to others. That passion is fulfilled through volunteering with local non-profits and his involvement as a board member of TechPoint Foundation for Youth, Marian University Technical Advisory Council, and Society for Information Management (SIM). He earned a degree in both Biochemistry and Computer Science, and later earned his MBA from Kelley School of Business where he continues to be involved. Mike believes code is a tool that can modernize the workplace and he is an advocate for the 4-day work week global initiative.

A Toronto native with a deep connection to his Punjabi (Indian) culture, Mike Gill resides in Zionsville, Indiana, with his wife and three young children – raising them with the hope that they too will share his passion for using code to transform their community.

About Jason Hines

Jason Hines is the Vice President of Sales for 5 Rivers Automation, a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and data analytics automation solution provider focused on humanizing work.

Jason is an accomplished technical and sales leader with 20+ years of IT experience across infrastructure, resiliency, and cloud. He has successfully supported organizations ranging from major enterprises to SMBs and nonprofits, including large healthcare systems, financial institutions, manufacturers, and small businesses solve complex IT problems and execute their strategic visions effectively. With a passion for helping people, Jason now leverages his expertise to assist organizations in modernizing their workplaces and operations through automation. He believes technology can transform the way we work to be more rewarding.

Jason resides in Noblesville, Indiana with his wife and daughter. As a Girl Dad, he is dedicated to raising an empowered, confident daughter and dismantling barriers of bias and inequality.

Episode Highlights

[00:00:00]: Gen AI and RPA

[00:00:18]: Intro – What is RPA?

[00:01:50]: Mike Gill and Jason Hines Journey

[00:07:51]: Starting with the Basics

[00:16:11]: What it’s not

[00:21:13]: RPA – An Employee Engagement Tool

[00:29:31]: To ROI or Not To ROI

[00:33:02]: Jason and Mike Share the Call to Action

[00:34:31]: Closing

Episode Transcript

Jason Hines [00:00:00]:

You’re seeing the integration of Gen AI. Everybody loves that term. It’s everywhere. Now we’re starting to figure out, okay, how can we use it? How can we take it and apply it to these technologies to make them even better?

Voice Over – Ben Miller [00:00:18]:

Technology is transforming how we think, how we lead, and how we win. From InterVision, this is Status Go, the show helping IT leaders move beyond the status quo, master their craft, and propel their IT vision.

Jeff Ton [00:00:35]:

Welcome to Status Go. I’m your host, Jeff Ton. Before we dive into today’s episode, I have a favor to ask. If you are a listener of Status Go, tell a friend about us. We would really appreciate it. Thanks a lot.

Today’s topic is RPA – robotic process automation. RPA has been around for quite some time now, yet many organizations may just be discovering its benefits. Today, we’re going to dive into RPA, what it is, and what it is not. But more importantly, why you should consider RPA for your organizations.

Our guests today are the founders of 5 Rivers, a firm focused on RPA implementation and support. Mike Gill is a former CIO—and co-founder with Jason Hines. Jason is a former systems engineer. In fact, he used to work for InterVision. He turned into an account executive several years ago, and now he’s one of the founders of 5 Rivers.

So, Mike, Jason, welcome to Status Go!

Mike Gill [00:01:45]:

Thank you, Jeff. We’re really excited to be here.

Jason Hines [00:01:48]:

Yeah. Thanks, Jeff.

Jeff Ton [00:01:50]:

I thought you were being shy there for a second there, Jason. But before we dive into RPA, I’d love for you each to share a bit about your background…your career journey. So, Mike, why don’t we start with you, man?

Mike Gill [00:02:10]:

Sure! So, I’ve been in IT for over 20 years and manufacturing for nearly 20, which is kind of crazy to say those types of numbers. I started my career as an enterprise Java developer. So back in the day, when having anything web-based was a big deal, e-commerce…e-business were the buzzwords back then I worked my way up. Calling it lead dev architect, and I’d like to say I was DevOps before there was DevOps. Now they got the cool. These kids have the cool terms for their titles.

I got a chance to work in that web development space with a lot of different things, but one of the tools that I came across was automated regression testing. And that really is a precursor to what we’re talking about today here with RPA, and we’ll touch upon that a little bit later. IT and just programming in general is kind of cool. So, you’re talking about automated regression testing starting being the precursor for RPA. Agile also started in the dev world, too.

So, I think that if anybody wants to know what the next big thing in business is going to be, just go see what the developers are doing.

Jeff Ton [00:03:25]:

Says the developer, right?

Mike Gill [00:03:27]:

That’s right. Along the way, I did eventually become a CIO, a chief information officer for an international manufacturing company. The cool part of that job was I got to stay hands-on. We actually had a homegrown ERP system that was also enterprise Java development, so I got to stay hands-on with that.

Got exposure to both being in charge of the IT and the OT side…so operational technology as well. That’s me in a nutshell, professionally.

Personally, pretty big in the STEM advocacy community, and they’ve started an all-girls STEM school and mostly on the weekends. If I’m not playing around with tech, I’m being a big kid with my three kids and cheering on my Toronto Maple Leafs. Jeff, you probably heard me commiserate after every season of them losing, but…

Jeff Ton [00:04:20]:

Awesome. Thanks, Mike. I appreciate that. And a big shout out to Poonam. She’s doing awesome work, and appreciate her impact in the community as well. Man, Jason, I gave a little bit of your story away. What’s your story? Fill in the blanks. And what brings you to this point in your career?

Jason Hines [00:04:44]:

Well, so first, I’d just like to thank you for finally letting me be on the podcast. I appreciate that. Been trying to get on here for a while. So, I’m finally here.

Mike Gill [00:04:54]:

It only took four and a half years, right?

Jason Hines [00:04:59]:

So, I’ve been in IT for over 20 years as well. Probably half of that I spent customer side. So, the usual help desk, desktop support system administrator, spending Thanksgiving evening in the data center waiting on hard drives to come because the SAN didn’t care that it was Thanksgiving. And so, somebody had to take care of those kinds of things, right? So, a lot of time in those trenches.

The second half of my career was on the vendor side, through MSP, so implementations and those kinds of things. But it’s all mostly been infrastructure up till now. But I spent a large part of that second half on helping folks with disaster recovery. So, architecting solutions for DR and data migrations, cloud migrations, those kinds of things. That’s really where my background is.

And as you said, the last couple of years, three years, I made that transition, some would say to the dark side, and went full sales. For me, it was just kind of that progression. I grew up on the tech side. I still love the tech side of things, but as I moved into the presales and I got closer to the customer side of IT, I really enjoyed the relationships and meeting new people, and understanding what their problems were and how I could help them solve them.

So that’s kind of what led me to where I am. And then so as far as, like, 5 Rivers and how Mike and I came to be on this, actually, Mike was a customer of mine, and so we kind of hit it…the I think we hit it off because I was that technical guy that turned sales, so I could actually have a technical conversation for sure.

Mike Gill [00:06:58]:

He didn’t have to call somebody else to answer questions. He actually had answers.

Jason Hines [00:07:06]:

We hit it off professionally and then personally. So, we’re the same age, kind of that similar path of coming up on things and what do we want to do next and what are we thinking about for, I guess you could say that second half and things that are important. And so, part of the reason I joined 5 Rivers is because of that. And what we’ll probably talk about some today is that…the why and why we brought this company together and why Mike and I decided to work together is that common vision and how we want to help people and how we can take that into the community and help others bring them know when they’re at a kind of that’s my background and the reason I’m here.

Jeff Ton [00:07:51]:

Awesome. I’m really excited to have you guys on the program today for a couple of reasons. First of all, I don’t think we’ve ever covered RPA in the four and a half years of Status Go, and I know it’s been around for a while, as I said in the opening, but it seems to be growing in people’s awareness as a tool to leverage. And then the other reason I’m excited is because I’ve known you both for several years. Mike probably going on ten years or so.

Mike Gill [00:08:28]:

Yeah.

Jeff Ton [00:08:29]:

And Jason, we may be closing in on that from our time together. Bluelock and InterVision, it’s probably getting pretty close to that as well. And I can’t be more excited about what you guys are doing with 5 Rivers. I think it’s awesome that you’re taking this jump, and I think you’re going to bring a lot of value to your clients.

So, let’s start with the basics, okay? What is RPA? And I’ll just throw that out, and either one of you can answer. And if you want to add to or detract from what the other one says, I’ll just throw that out. What is this RPA robotic process?

Jason Hines [00:09:12]:

So, I’ll take it first, give you kind of an overview, and then Mike can come in and probably give a little more of the deeper detail on it. But I guess the way to look at it, I like to explain to folks, especially folks that aren’t familiar or maybe aren’t technical folks, is think of it as your digital coworker or your digital assistant. Right?

So, you’ve got this work that you do every day, right? And at least some amount of that work is manual. It’s repetitive. It’s that mundane stuff. It’s transactional. Right? It’s those things that you’re doing invoicing, or you’re processing spreadsheets, or you’re moving data from this Excel spreadsheet into this ERP system. Right. It’s all stuff that needs to be done, but it’s not exciting. It doesn’t necessarily make you feel like you’re contributing to that larger thing within the business.

So, this digital worker, that’s what it’s great at. That’s exactly what it’s designed to do. So, this digital worker, you think about invoicing, this digital worker is the one that’s going to take that over, and it knows how to open those spreadsheets. It can pull data from those spreadsheets and then input that into an ERP system. It can extract data from one system and put it into another. You think of invoicing.

So, for example, we have a client from an invoicing perspective. They spend an hour to 4 hours a day doing invoicing, right? Pull up an invoice, manually enter that into the ERP, attach the invoice, send it on to somebody, rinse, and repeat. You don’t get a lot of excitement, right? And there’s a lot of room for error. This digital assistant, you can program it to do that for you, and it will do that piece of the work for you. Now it frees up that time of your day so that you can focus on strategic things for your business, move the business forward, and feel like you are contributing to a larger goal in the business.

Mike Gill [00:11:26]:

Yeah, Jason did a great job of explaining what RPA is. And I think RPA gets wrapped up in a whole host of other technologies under the larger umbrella of just general It automation. The one thing just on RPA specifically that I did want to call out is, now, we used to have systems that were monolithic. That used to be the goal. We’re going to have one SAP system that was going to do everything the business.

Jeff Ton [00:11:52]:

Absolutely.

Mike Gill [00:11:54]:

And what ended up happening was it just wouldn’t do it well. And really, what people have gravitated towards now is, let’s get the systems that are the best of breed for each function you need. Well, what that’s given rise to is you have data in different systems, and they may not be able to talk to each other. Now, there’s different ways to have IT systems talk to each other.

Obviously, there’s integration platforms. You can do API calls, so you can do custom API development, kind of build customizations into your platforms. Then there’s the rise of what I’ll call integration platform as a service. So, the Mulesofts and the Workados of the world are going to be able to do those types of things but also provide it in a low code and almost like a middleware kind of platform.

So, independent of building the customization into your SAP or your Salesforce, you can do it in an independent place that kind of talks to both sides. Now, those technologies are for integration because the real goal at the end of the day is to get the data to be talking to each other. You don’t want to do duplicate data entry. You want to be able to leverage all the data you have across your entire enterprise.

Now, doing it in those API-based in that fashion requires a skill set. It requires a knowledge of how to understand what the API is and how to program an API. And what RPA allows you to do is really take it from the front end, I call it. The API is a back-end integration. I like to think of RPA as a front-end integration. So, it mimics 100% of what a user can do on a computer. There’s tools that allow you to kind of record your steps. So even if you don’t want to program the actual steps that somebody does using traditional coding methods, there’s tools that are recorders, and they watch what actions somebody performs on a computer.

So, where RPA kind of stops is RPA is just mimicking what a user can do on the front end, but the tools around it. So, you can get an open-source RPA tool, and we actually work with one of the vendors, Robocorp, for an open-source RPA solution. But it’s doing all the things we just talked about. What it doesn’t do is allow you to have that low code kind of piece to it. It’s not there. So, these other platforms like Automation Anywhere that we’re also working with, what comes in their suite of products is they take that core of what’s RPA, which mimics a user’s action. And now it’s building around these other tools like low code platforms where you can kind of drag and drop and do the recorders. So that’s adding onto it.

So, technically, low code is not RPA, but they’re pretty tightly coupled in terms of producing value. So, the great thing, I think this is where the true value of RPA comes in. So, when you pair that front-end integration with the low code platform, now you don’t need to have the traditional coder doing the integration. Now you can have the tech-savvy business user who understands the process inside out who can at least think logically. They can create that integration. You’re not dependent on centralized IT to do some heavy lifting with maybe Python or Java or C code. Now, this business user can kind of create that automation. So, I think that’s the real value of RPA.

One last thing I just wanted to add into there is…you’ll hear Gartner will talk about a term that they’re throwing out which is called hyperautomation. And so, where they’re going, and they’re talking about where the industry is going, is it’s really a business mindset. So now the businesses are thinking about we’re going to take a business focus on automating these repetitive manual tasks, and whatever technology it takes to do it, we will use. And that kind of falls under that kind of corporate mandate or that corporate initiative to automate. And so, RPA falls under that. The integration platform as a service falls under that. Intelligent document processing kind of falls under that. So, it’s use whatever tools in your toolbox to automate kind of falls into that hyper-automation.

Jeff Ton [00:16:11]:

So, we’ve talked about what RPA is, what isn’t it? Because is it just workflow? Is it AI? So what isn’t it?

Mike Gill [00:16:31]:

First?

Jason Hines [00:16:32]:

Go for it. No, go ahead, Mike, go ahead.

Mike Gill [00:16:35]:

I would say just kind of we were just touching upon some of that just before you asked that question. It’s not code. That’s the first thing I will say. It’s not a heavy code process. The reason I bring that up is where I’ve seen RPA succeed and fail. One of those determining factors is who’s the champion of this project or who’s the champion of this initiative. And I have seen that when it falls under only IT, they treat it like it’s the traditional software development lifecycle. It’s not traditional coding. It is a different, you have to have a different mentality to be successful at it.

I will call The other things you touched upon cousins to RPA. RPA is strictly what Jason described earlier. It’s just that mimicking of users’ actions through a computer user interface. That’s all RPA is. Does it play well with some of the AI tools out there, like sentiment analysis and intelligent document processing? So the solution that Jason was talking about earlier with the invoicing, yeah, that’s RPA paired up with intelligent document processing.

So you use machine learning models to take this invoice and be able to read what’s on the invoice because every vendor that’s sending you an invoice has their own format. I wish there was a universally accepted format for Invoice, but that’s not the case. So it will leverage machine learning. It will leverage those types of tools. And the great thing is because under this kind of hyper-automation initiative, you’re going to pair up. You don’t have to do RPA at the expense of doing API. You can mix and match them together.

So that’s the other thing. The solution might be under a platform like Automation Anywhere. So that might be the driver. But those platforms internally will have intelligent document processing. They’ll have API capabilities. But if you have a MuleSoft already, it’ll play well with your MuleSoft. If you have AWS Textrack to do kind of IDP, it will play with it’s really the lines are really getting know and you’ll see these vendors are changing their marketing to reflect that they don’t want to be called an RPA vendor anymore. Terms like success platform is the new.

Jeff Ton [00:18:59]:

Jason. Anything you want to add to?

Jason Hines [00:19:03]:

I think you know the other thing you’ll see, too, and I think Mike touched on it a little now in that term success platform. I think you’ll hear more, but you’re seeing the integration of Gen AI. Everybody loves that term. It’s everywhere now. Gen AI is getting wholly infused in these platforms. For instance, like Automation Anywhere is all in on that. And what’s cool about that is it doesn’t mean that RPA is going away. RPA is still doing the heavy lifting in the background. But what’s cool about now, we talk about the business users, and we talk about the folks that are the SMEs about the processes that they do every day.

What the Gen AI does when you integrate it into the platform, it’s embedded into your systems like SAP or ServiceNow or Workday. And so now that person that’s the expert, they can lean on this Gen AI tool, whatever you want to call it, whatever the particular integration is. But now they can say, “hey, I want to create a BOT to automate this process that I just realized I’m doing every day repeatedly.” Right? And you’ve got a form and it’s docked in there and you can tell it what you want to do and it’s the precursor.

So now the people that really know how this process works, the people that live it and breathe it, have that accessibility. Right? It’s bringing the technology to the people that really can power its use. And then that feeds into the background where it can build. Then the RPA builds those bots, the RPA runs those automations, but then it can tie in. Like Mike was saying, no, that’s the front end, but then you’ve got your pro-coders on the back end that can then enhance it and grow it from there. Right? So, I think to me, that’s the other cool part that we’re really seeing. Now that Gen AI has been around for a little while, we’re starting to figure out, okay, how can we use it? How can we take it and apply it to these technologies to make them even better?

Mike Gill [00:21:13]:

Yeah, I would just add one thing that’s not technical. I think there’s a lot of marketing and a lot, I know, initial discussions around RPA as a way, you know, kind of replace hours like what people do. But I firmly believe that RPA is not a replacement to workers. From our customers that we’re working with. They’re looking at is that they want to get more value out of their employees. They’re not looking at replacing headcount. So I think that’s also just something I wanted to call out as what is RPA not? I think if you’re doing it right, it’s also not a replacement for your workforce.

Jeff Ton [00:21:52]:

Well, and that’s a great point, Mike, and a great segue to the why. Why are companies doing this? Why RPA? Why now? What are you seeing out there when you talk to your clients and prospects? What things are they benefiting from using RPA?

Jason Hines [00:22:12]:

So, I think from my perspective, I see it as employee retention and creating value for your employees. For instance, customers we’re working with, one customer we’re working with today, they’ve got one person dedicated to this particular process that they have, and there’s a big turnaround. So it’s admissions. They have over ten thousand applications a year that they’re working with. And one person is responsible for processing these. And so it’s not about replacing that person. They don’t want to replace that person with this automation. What they’re trying to do is how can we help them do their job better, how can we slice up this processing and automate as much as of it we can? And then her focus can then turn to taking care of the one-offs, taking care of the things that don’t necessarily fit in the model, if you will. And then that allows her to then have some breathing room. That allows her to step back and be strategic about what she’s responsible for and helping get these applications turned around quicker.

Mike Gill [00:23:30]:

Yeah. Jeff, I think I’m going to go back to just even a more general question of why did I start Five Rivers Automation? And that kind of I think answers this question as well, of why would you do it now? Five Rivers Automation really started from just deep reflection during the pandemic. I think all of us had time for some deep reflection during the pandemic.

Jeff Ton [00:23:54]:

Yeah, we didn’t have the commute. We had to fill the time somewhere.

Mike Gill [00:23:59]:

It started with the basic stuff about your health, your this and those types of things. But I really got into the question of just why do you work. And in manufacturing, they have a process called “five whys.” Like you keep asking over and over to get to the deeper meaning. So I kind of really did that to myself. Why do I work? Why does anybody work? How do we work? Because we were all challenged with working in a different way. It just challenged a lot of these assumptions that we held as constants. Like you have to be in the office to be productive. You have to work 40 hours a week to be productive and a full-time employee. There’s all these things that we have just assumed are constants and when a pandemic happens you just kind of really challenge those assumptions.

That paired with when I was a CIO, one of my direct reports, one of my senior guys, he was also one of my best friends, Conrad Sims. And towards the end of the pandemic he actually was diagnosed with terminal cancer. And just in a few short months, it went from having my friend who was full of life and just a vibrant person to losing him. And when you are with somebody in their final days and they’ll say something that sounds simple, but when it’s coming from them and it’s just like live every day to the fullest.

Jeff Ton [00:25:27]:

Yeah.

Mike Gill [00:25:28]:

And I think that along with when your wife tells you that you’re going through a career midlife crisis, just don’t question it. People who are close to you and love you, they see things, and they know things about you. So all those things above really got me questioning, like how can I really make a difference? What can I do? And I’m a technologist at the end of the day, I love technology. I’ve been doing automated regression testing. I’ve done RPA for over 20 years. I’ve been doing it since the beginning. And I looked at it, and I said, what really resonated with me was, as developers, we automated testing because we wanted to have time to do the valuable stuff, like actually coding and looking at the next enhancement. And when I saw RPA was applying that same principle to the workplace, it just resonated with me. It was just something that inside, I just felt like that is what I need to be doing.

Jeff Ton [00:26:20]:

Yeah.

Mike Gill [00:26:21]:

And I look at this, and I’ve paired whether you can look at Gallup that does research on kind of just the global workforce, and they have an annual state of the global workplace. And in 2023, they quoted that $8.8 trillion are lost on the global economy because of low engagement…low employee engagement. And as you start asking again, go back to those “five whys.” Why is there low engagement? It’s because as we collect more data and we have more of these processes, we’re trying to make humans be robots.

Jeff Ton [00:27:00]:

Right.

Mike Gill [00:27:01]:

Very robotic in their jobs, process all this data, do all these things, give me these reports, do this, and it’s always on. And so we used to talk about work-life balance on the one hand, which I think is still an important conversation to have. But really, what happened was technology, and just expectations of work were always on. It’s a 24/7 job, and I think the mentality of corporations and senior management has to change too. Now, we should be talking about work-life integration. How do you kind of balance that? You’re asking people to check emails in the evening, on the weekend, or be available if an emergency happens, but why aren’t you okay with them taking a kid to a doctor’s appointment without having to take time off?

Jeff Ton [00:27:49]:

Right!

Mike Gill [00:27:51]:

And you have people that are doing, quote-unquote, important jobs. They have to wake up at 08:00 a.m. To run some report or whatever it is because somebody else needs that data. And it’s like we can have a digital workforce do these things that people think are time-sensitive and time critical or there’s just a large amount of it. Let’s let them do that and let people focus on the value-add and the thinking and the creativity and the innovation. That’s what we want people thinking about.

And the other thing is, just like you have athletes, your brain is a muscle, too. You look at in basketball, they have this whole thing coming up, like load balancing. Have you seen these players will take some days off so they can be fresh for the playoffs? Right, right. It’s getting to be a normal thing. And I don’t know why we don’t…workplaces should look at that too, and say that if we’re making people actually use their brain, and they’re using that muscle, let them work a little bit less hours if they’re doing more valuable work.

And maybe there’s a whole nother podcast, Jeff, on the four-day work week. But I am a big proponent of the Four Day Work Week, that global movement that is making a lot of attention, and I think it doesn’t have to be done the same way. I think people will look at that and say, oh, every Friday off. No, that’s not what it’s about. But if you really dig into what they’re saying, there is people are being asked to do always on super valuable work that requires a lot of brain power, and you got to let them have the time to recharge to make.

Jeff Ton [00:29:24]:

That there’s got to be rest.

Mike Gill [00:29:26]:

Anyway, it was the story of why I wanted to do.

Jeff Ton [00:29:31]:

I think it’s interesting, Mike and Jason, that what I didn’t hear in that was ought to save you money. Right? Because that’s kind of the default, why for a lot of technology. Oh, put this in and the ROI, it’ll have a payback in six months or ten months or whatever it is. What I hear you saying instead is it may save money, but that’s not the driver. The driver is to free your staff up to do more valuable work.

Mike Gill [00:30:13]:

Yes. The accountants are always going to want that ROI calculation.

Jeff Ton [00:30:18]:

Oh, I know, I know. And love many accountants.

Mike Gill [00:30:21]:

Yeah. But I hear the same thing, Jeff. We go to these networking events, and a lot of times, even the IT problems, when we’re in these leadership conferences, it all comes back to people. It never ends up being the technology is the problem. And the other thing with people that you keep hearing about is I can’t find good people. So if you have good people, you should do everything you can to keep them engaged and keep them in your employment, like keep them as part of your team.

Jeff Ton [00:30:49]:

Yeah, I agree.

Well, guys, we are out of time. I knew this would fly by once we dug into this and talked about this. We may have to have a part two later to dive into even more detail. But I know you both have listened to a lot of status quo episodes, so you’re not going to be surprised with this last question, which is, what are one or two things our listeners should do tomorrow because they listened to us today?

So, Jason, I’m going to put you on the spot, my friend, and ask you what are one or two things our listeners should go do?

Jason Hines [00:31:26]:

Yeah. So I think a couple of things to do. The first is visit our website. So 5Rivers.IO. You go out there, there’s a form out there that you can fill out and reach out to us and just have a conversation. We can dig in with you directly and talk to you folks about this a little more and see how RPA and kind of this idea of making work more valuable for folks might fit you and your company.

And the second one, so we started back in May a few months ago, we started a meetup, and so the whole idea there was Mike and I noticed that there wasn’t a group like that around the area at the time focused on RPA. And so we’re like, you know what, we think we need to have that. And so we typically do one in-person meetup once a quarter here in Indy, and then we do virtual meetups in between. So that’s another good thing. Go out, check out the meetup, and join it. We have folks across the spectrum. So we’ve got folks that don’t do RPA today and are curious about what it is and how to get started all the way through. Folks that have been doing RPA for almost ten years and are really far down the line. So it’s a really engaging group, a lot of good topics. So I think that’s also a great place for people to start as well.

Jeff Ton [00:33:02]:

Well, and I love that you do it virtually as well so that our listeners who are not in Indianapolis can join in the fun. So, absolutely be on the lookout for those announcements.

So, Mike, I’m going to turn to you now. What are one or two things our listeners should go do tomorrow because they listened to our conversation today?

Mike Gill [00:33:25]:

Well, one, I’ll double-click on what Jason says. So do those two things first. The other, I would say, go follow Gallup on LinkedIn. I went through part of that self-reflection during the pandemic. I actually took their Strengths Finder assessment, and I found that very valuable. And then they also have a lot of good research just on engagement in the workplace. So even before you get to the point of getting to the technology and doing an RPA or some kind of It automation project, just understanding what kind of cultural change do you want to make in your workplace. And I think that’s a great source to learn just about employee engagement.

Jeff Ton [00:34:10]:

I love that. We’re actually going to have an episode coming up in a few weeks on Strength Finders and what that can mean for you in your career journey and for your team. So, a great lead into that. Mike, it’s like you kind of knew and read my mind.

Mike Gill [00:34:27]:

Dude, we’ve known each other for long enough.

Jeff Ton [00:34:31]:

Yeah, we have. Well, this has been great, guys. Thank you so much for carving out time. I really appreciate it. I know our listeners do, and I really do want to have you back, maybe dive a little bit deeper into RPA and talk about that maybe in a few months. So if you’re up for that, would love to have you guys back.

Jason Hines [00:34:53]:

Yeah, absolutely.

Jeff Ton [00:34:56]:

Awesome. Well, if you have a question or want to learn more, visit intervision.com. The show notes there will provide links, and contact information will provide links to 5Rivers.IO. And probably a link to Gallup as well, since Mike mentioned that. This is Jeff Ton for Mike Gill and Jason Hines, thank you very much for listening.

Voice Over – Ben Miller [00:35:24]:

You’ve been listening listening to the Status Go podcast. You can subscribe on iTunes or get more information at intervision.com. If you’d like to contribute to the conversation, find InterVision on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter. Thanks.