Navigating Digital Transformation: Paul Jurasin

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Narrator

At a crossroads of uncertainty and opportunity. How do you navigate forward? This podcast focuses on making smart choices in a rapidly changing world. We investigate the challenges of being at a crossroads and finding opportunities that arise out of disruption. Listen in on future forward conversations with the brightest luminaries, movers and shakers. Let's navigate forward together and create what's next.

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Lisa Thee

Hello everyone. Welcome to the Navigating Forward podcast. My name is Lisa Thi and I'll be your host today. We love to collect the best movers, shakers and luminaries in the industry to share them with our audience and help you see how innovation is live in action. Today, I am thrilled to be sharing with you Paul Gerson. Paul is the director of the Cal Poly Digital Transformation Hub and drives awesome public private collaborations to solve big, hairy issues that nobody can solve alone and creates a lot of shared value in the world.

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Lisa Thee

And we're excited to talk to you about how he accomplishes that. So please join me in welcoming Paul. Thank you for joining us on the podcast.

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Paul Jurasin

Next week. Thanks for having me here today because.

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Lisa Thee

Me too. Me too. I hope that at the end of this we identify opportunities for people that might be thinking about how to solve their own problems and recognizing the opportunities to collaborate with academia and private industry coming together to solve big, hairy challenges.

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Paul Jurasin

Yeah.

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Lisa Thee

You do that all day, right?

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Paul Jurasin

We do that all day. Every day. That's right.

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Lisa Thee

Awesome. So do you mind telling us before we jump into that, can you tell us a little bit about your background, where you're from and how you think that influence where you've evolved, you and your career?

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Paul Jurasin

Sure. Where to start? I could go back a long way. I won't go all the way back. But I'm from from Michigan originally, so I grew up in northern Michigan and went to college at Western Michigan University. And after after college, I went to work for the intelligence community for a little while, so I did that. One of the things as we start talking about this is that when I look back at my my career over the years, things that I've been seeing is that they all have a certain component.

00:02:20:27 - 00:02:43:00

Paul Jurasin

Every one of my jobs had a certain kind of a certain component, and it started back there with the intelligence community. And what we were doing then is kind of a digital transformation. You know, it's amazing that 30 years ago we were doing digital transformation and we still are today. But at that point it was taking manually produced product and creating them digitally for the first time.

00:02:43:03 - 00:03:14:13

Paul Jurasin

So that's kind of where I started and that's kind of what happened as I went through about 30 years or so of of jobs. So, yes, I work for the government, for federal government for quite a while with the Defense Department and then with the Department of Agriculture. I worked in the telecommunications area for the Department of Agriculture and then with the U.S. Geological Survey as well at the National Geospatial Technical Operations Center, which is responsible for the national map of the US.

00:03:14:15 - 00:03:41:07

Paul Jurasin

So that was kind of cool. And then about ten years ago, I moved to Cal Poly and Watt moved there as the director of Enterprise Systems, which is all of our infrastructure on campus, including our networking and classroom technologies, data centers and things like that. About halfway through that, five years ago or so, I kind of transitioned over to the innovation side of things, and that's where I am today.

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Lisa Thee

Oh, wonderful. It's so neat to see that you've had a foot in the public sector, a foot in private sector business, and now you're able to merge those worlds together in order to help Sometimes people that don't know how to talk to each other exactly the same in the same language, right?

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Paul Jurasin

Totally. That's an interesting, interesting way to look at it. So, you know, I kind of just went through all of the government jobs I've had. I've also had some jobs in the private sector, including startups, health care, areas like that as well. So what I find is that people will say, you know, the government, government agencies don't move very fast and people don't work very hard.

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Paul Jurasin

I didn't find that at all. Working in all of these government jobs I've had. In fact, I think some of the most innovative and smartest people there are working in government. The problem is that there's a lot of bureaucracy around government and people can't move as fast as they want to. So but I would never say that people who work in government aren't aren't innovative.

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Paul Jurasin

I think they really are. And then when you try to create a public private partnership, people in the private industry have much more freedom to be able to move more quickly. So you have to kind of merge those two cultures. One less bureaucratic and one that wants to move fast and have them work together to create to create new solutions to problems.

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Paul Jurasin

And that's always a fun thing to do. But it's when you do it right, I think it can be really valuable.

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Lisa Thee

I also have seen that through my career journey. I used to sell to the federal government for a large tech company and I saw a heck of a lot of innovation, especially in those three letter agencies. And then also it is interesting when you bring together the public private sector and the places where I've usually seen that intersection point is the public sectors rich in data and challenges to solve.

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Lisa Thee

And the private sector is rich in innovation and being able to glean meaningful insights and wisdom out of an ocean of information and helping to get the signal out of the noise. So when they can come together with a common goal, it can be transformational. And I think that's kind of some of the origin stories of the Digital transformation Hub.

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Lisa Thee

Do you mind giving us an overview of what that program is and what it does?

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Paul Jurasin

Yeah, So about five years ago, Cal Poly was on a on a transformation journey. I guess we'll call it, where we our infrastructure on campus was starting to age and we knew we needed to replace what we had on campus already. So we had a big data center that was that was very old and we knew the facility needed to be we need to do something about the facility.

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Paul Jurasin

So one of the things we looked at is what can we do as we move into the future? And we looked at building new data centers and we looked at moving a data centers to a colocation facility. We looked and then we looked at cloud technologies as well. Long story short, we did a lot of analysis on that.

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Paul Jurasin

Hired a consultant to help us with pricing and that sort of thing and decided that we were going to move our i.t infrastructure to the cloud. So we chose A.W. as as our as our cloud vendor at that point. But when we looked at what we were doing at Cal Poly, we said, you know, we don't want to just replace our infrastructure and create something.

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Paul Jurasin

We already have that. That's nice, but it doesn't really move us forward very much. So what we decided to do is to really look at how we could get some of the latest technologies into the hands of our faculty and students nearly as soon as it came out. Right. We can't do that in a data center because we can't move fast enough.

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Paul Jurasin

We can't upgrade things fast enough, we can't maintain things fast enough. But in the cloud you can and you can do a lot more experimentation in the cloud and you can fail and it doesn't hurt anything. So we wanted to be able to get that in our students hands so they could go try out these new technologies and and do some research and look at what they could be good for.

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Paul Jurasin

And that includes things like artificial intelligence and big data analytics and things like that. So we got to that point and said, yeah, we're going to move our I.T infrastructure to the cloud. That was one decision. Second piece of it though, which to me was more exciting, is that we wanted to create something that allowed our students to get experience with real world customers, solving real problems with the latest innovation processes and the latest technologies.

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Paul Jurasin

We had that in mind. We talked a little bit about that and how we might do that together. They had not done this with the university before either, so we were kind of inventing it on the fly from there.

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Lisa Thee

And so you knew how to entrepreneurial and Yeah.

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Paul Jurasin

Yeah. So it was it was an interesting time. It took us maybe a year or so to talk through all of the things we wanted to do. And we came to a conclusion that we would open an innovation center at Cal Poly called the Cal Poly Digital Transformation Hub, powered by A.W. S because it provided us with some expertise.

00:08:48:08 - 00:09:16:18

Paul Jurasin

So we have some people onsite that help us with the technology side of things and the innovation side of things. And then Cal Poly has some folks as well that are kind of a parallel team to the team. So after we decided that's what we were going to do, we said, okay, then what we're going to do is we're going to bring in students as student employees and have them work side by side with us as we solve problems in the world.

00:09:16:20 - 00:09:36:17

Paul Jurasin

So the next problem was, of course, what problems are we going to solve in the world and how are we going to get those those problems to come to us. So we looked at the overall overall marketplace. And when we looked at that, we said, you know, it looks like the private sector is moving to the cloud more quickly.

00:09:36:17 - 00:10:02:28

Paul Jurasin

They're adopting emerging technologies much more quickly than the public sector. So when we looked at nonprofit education and government, we said, you know, they're falling behind because the private sector is moving ahead very quickly. So let's focus our efforts on the public sector, on those three areas nonprofits, government and education. So we did that and we started small, right?

00:10:02:29 - 00:10:23:14

Paul Jurasin

We started with some small projects around San Luis Obispo County where we are. We looked at some others around community college system. And what we found is that our students were gaining a great deal of experience working with some of these these customers out there. Because when you're going to school and even when you're doing labs in school, you don't get the hands on experience with customer.

00:10:23:14 - 00:11:02:22

Paul Jurasin

You don't get to see what customers care about. And the innovation processes we use are based on design thinking. It's actually the working backwards methodology that Amazon uses, which really focuses on the customer, starts with the customer understanding who that is, what the problem they're having. If you solve the problem, what benefits are they going to gain? And then taking that solution and the solution, mind you, not the technology upfront but the solution and then coming up with a way to prototype that solution in technology to be able to show the customer whether this is really what they want to do or not with the idea being let's do this quickly, let's do a ten

00:11:02:22 - 00:11:18:21

Paul Jurasin

week sprint, come up with a prototype, show it to the customer, and they haven't spent any money yet. Whereas, you know, sometimes the customer will say, Here's what I want. They go hire a company to build it, they build it, they spend $10 million and they come back and say, Yeah, that wasn't what I wanted. And they wasted that money.

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Paul Jurasin

So that's the thing we're trying to trying to avoid.

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Lisa Thee

One of my favorite of the scientists recommendations is always listen to what the customer is trying to solve, not to what they say they want. Because oftentimes you don't know until you see it, right. You got to have some experience with it and go, Well, that wasn't quite what I was envisioning. And then so getting that feedback early, when you haven't invested a lot of time, money and energy and frankly your reputation and to it being successful allows you to remain open to everything and attach to nothing and be able to really hear the voice of the customer.

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Lisa Thee

Right?

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Paul Jurasin

Yeah. You know, in, in our and our innovation workshops that we do, we try to get the actual customer into the room to be involved in these workshops. So let's say, for example, we're trying to solve a homelessness problem. We might want to get some homeless homeless people in the workshop or at least someone who works with the homeless in the workshop.

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Paul Jurasin

So we get that real, authentic view of what a solution might look like for them. And by doing that, we really help. It really helps us to identify who it is that we're really trying to solve a problem for. You know, when we first ask questions for to a public sector organization, sometimes when they say, so, who's your customer, they might say, Oh, my customer is the governor or the mayor, and we're like, Is that really who you're trying to solve the problem for?

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Paul Jurasin

And then they have to think about that a little more, and then we try to drive that down to who really is going to benefit from that solution. So that's kind of what we work on.

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Lisa Thee

Yeah, it's incredibly important to be customer oriented in your solution or else you're going to be pushing something on people that they don't want, right? The only way to create pull is really hearing people and hearing what their needs are. Right?

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Paul Jurasin

Exactly. Yeah. Having those those workshops with the actual customer in many cases, we'll talk to them about things that we thought we knew the solution to. And they'll be they'll tell us, no, we won't use that for whatever reason it might be. But you know, they'll be like, yeah, that seems like a good idea, but we won't use it.

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Paul Jurasin

So those are the.

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Lisa Thee

Kinds of things for tech now, technology for technology's sake and innovation, for innovation sake is pretty much useless.

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Paul Jurasin

It's pretty useless, right? Totally.

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Lisa Thee

Yeah. And it's demoralizing to the team. That's like we built this really cool thing. So being able to bring people together earlier in the process to make sure that everybody's heard and we can get the benefit of everybody's input versus just the builders is a great lesson for academics to learn early in their career versus unfortunately on the other side of things, right?

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Paul Jurasin

Totally. You know, one of the things that we learned when we first started the digital transformation, so we launched it in the in March, now that October of 2017. So it's been about three and a half, almost four years. Coming up, some of those first customers we worked with, you know, we would bring people into that initial innovation workshop and we'd bring, you know, 75% technology people and 25% mission people.

00:14:20:22 - 00:14:48:05

Paul Jurasin

And what we found is that technology people love technology and they love to build things with technology, but they don't think about the customer enough. So we changed our ratio as we moved on, and now we do it just about the opposite way, where we have 75% of our mission people and 25% technology people in those first workshops because we've those mission people really care about solving that problem, but they don't care about technology, don't care how you do it, they just care that we want to solve that problem.

00:14:48:07 - 00:14:58:26

Paul Jurasin

So we then we bring in the technologists later in the process and tell them what we really want to do to solve the problem. And then they're great at saying, Oh, there's your problem, we can do this and this and this, and that'll help solve that.

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Lisa Thee

So yeah, technical technology is the tool, not the solution. Right?

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Paul Jurasin

Exactly. Yeah. Cool.

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Lisa Thee

So can you share with us some of the projects you've been most proud of that you guys have deployed since 2017 into the world that we can all relate to?

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Paul Jurasin

Sure. Where to start with that? I would say that one of the one of the coolest projects we worked on was with the city of Santa monica, and the city of Santa monica was doing. They were doing a pilot program where they were bringing in electric scooters into the cities to allow the residents to use electric scooters. Mobile electric scooters around town.

00:15:44:00 - 00:16:05:08

Paul Jurasin

And what they wanted us to do to come in is to say, okay, so we have I think they allowed something like 2500 scooters on the street and this pilot from various companies. And what they said was, you know, we don't want the scooters scooter riders to ride on sidewalks because that causes too much of a problem for pedestrians who are walking on sidewalks.

00:16:05:08 - 00:16:28:03

Paul Jurasin

And it's dangerous. And we've done fines, we've done all kinds of things to try to keep them off the sidewalks. We've done some enforcement, but it's really not working. Can you help us come up with a solution to keep scooter riders off? And we we looked at it and we said we did a workshop with their their government folks and we talked to the police officers and what they were seeing on the streets.

00:16:28:06 - 00:16:50:28

Paul Jurasin

And we created some some personas of the the residents of the city to try to get an idea of what what their concerns were. And basically it came down to we need to keep the scooters on the sidewalks somehow. So we brought in some so we knew what we wanted to do. We didn't know how yet, but we knew what the solution needed to be in order to be able to keep those scooters off sidewalks.

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Paul Jurasin

And it wasn't working by having somebody get people tickets or put up signs. We knew that that didn't work.

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Lisa Thee

Yeah, once you have the Y, then you can get the help. But if you start with that, how usually it's really hard to get to that place, right?

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Paul Jurasin

Yeah, totally. So what we did was we, we brought, we brought that whole problem statement back to our, our office here in San Luis Obispo, and we had some of our students looking at it and one of our students that was working with us, this was a couple of years ago in the summer, one of our students said, you know, there's a new G.P.S. chip out that's supposed to be able to identify where you are, plus or minus a foot.

00:17:30:02 - 00:17:51:17

Paul Jurasin

He said, What? And I know they put them in a particular cell phone. Why don't I go by that cell phone will implement it on the scooter. He did 3D printing for the case of it. He put it on the scooter and said, I'll test that around the buildings we have here. And he went out and did that and he said, it works great unless you're next to a building, because then you don't have enough sight into the sky and it's off by 20 feet.

00:17:51:19 - 00:18:07:22

Paul Jurasin

So we looked at that and we're like, what are we going to do about that? And literally the next day the same student came in and said, You know what? I can put an accelerometer on this chip as well, and it's going to measure the roughness of the surface that the scooter is riding on. You know what, sidewalks have an expansion track every four feet.

00:18:07:26 - 00:18:23:03

Paul Jurasin

So if I look at the data and I see a peak every four feet, I know that I'm on a sidewalk. And when I know I'm on a sidewalk, I can turn the power off of that scooter. And that's what we did. We created this technology that would do just that. And it was accurate about 95% of the time.

00:18:23:06 - 00:18:42:25

Paul Jurasin

And it got back to the city of Santa monica now. And we we got a presentation with many of the scooter vendors in the city, and we had our scooter with us so we could test it. And they basically said, yeah, we're going to require that our scooter vendors have a technology like this on the scooter right in the city.

00:18:42:25 - 00:18:52:18

Paul Jurasin

So that the idea there was not so much that we were creating a technology to be implemented anywhere. We are proving that was possible. And then they put.

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Lisa Thee

That by doing that proof of concept, you empowered the government officials to be able to write standards and requirements that scooter manufacture could align to, and they can drive their own innovation as to how they want to make that more ideal. I'm in a production capacity, right, Because that's that's their sweet spot. They're the innovators of that scooter.

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Lisa Thee

You don't want to tell them how to do it. You want to help them understand what's required, and they will come with all sorts of new innovative ways to accomplish it, right?

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Paul Jurasin

Yeah, totally. And one of the things that we do with all of our AI projects we work on is that once we come up with a solution and we prototype it, we everything we do becomes open source and we publish it on our website. You could go there today, go get that code that we wrote for the scooter if you want it.

00:19:39:23 - 00:19:56:26

Paul Jurasin

And the idea of being we don't want we don't want to have a city, for example, solve that same problem 50 times at different cities across the country. We want them to take the solution that we already came up with and go use wherever you want. And that's the same thing with all of our solutions. We publish them all in open source.

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Lisa Thee

So that's awesome. And so working. Yeah. So you over the years as an advisor and a collaborator, one of my favorite projects that I've heard about you guys doing was actually in partnership with Launch Consulting, and that was connecting on the cybersecurity front of taking data from one of our large multinational tech company clients that they wanted to open source from their data for good team, to collaborate with academia and the public sector to be able to help provide more information for the impacts of crisis zones on human trafficking recruitment.

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Lisa Thee

And it was really cool to see what happens when you take the best in class tech company, the one of the top leading research places for engineering and innovation, and a really strong mission based culture in our data for good practice to come together to be able to do a capstone project around that leading thinking. And it just really grounded it down for me.

00:20:57:27 - 00:21:11:06

Lisa Thee

Why It matters that we all come together to solve these big, difficult challenges, because everybody had a very different lens of what they brought to the table. And teamwork really does make the dream work, right?

00:21:11:09 - 00:21:40:13

Paul Jurasin

Absolutely. You know, one of the things that we find in our our innovation workshops and we do work very closely with the California Cybersecurity Institute, who you worked with there is when we bring people into a room, in many cases to do an innovation workshop. You know, let's say we're doing a law enforcement challenge. We might bring in a district attorney, we might bring in a police officer from the field, a detective, maybe even a police chief to look at what kind of a problem we might be looking at.

00:21:40:15 - 00:22:00:24

Paul Jurasin

In many cases, when we do that, it's the first time all of those people have been in the same room together at the same time. So, you know, they all talk about the problems they have in various areas and components, but they never talk about the problem together. So when we can get them together here to talk about a problem, you know, it's like a light bulb goes on and they're like, oh, we didn't know that you had that problem.

00:22:00:26 - 00:22:29:00

Paul Jurasin

The same time we're having this problem. And when you get them together to start doing kind of structured innovation work, you know, with ideation and empathy mapping and and things like that, you know, putting that just a little bit of structure around how you might solve a problem really kind of turns their thinking around to really make them think more about how we can talk about more about the customer and what you're solving for the customer and what the impacts are to the people who are actually using the solution.

00:22:29:02 - 00:22:32:20

Paul Jurasin

So so yeah, it's, it's pretty exciting sometimes.

00:22:32:23 - 00:22:50:17

Lisa Thee

Yeah. How do you guys apply data and technology to solving these problems? Obviously you have the framework for prototyping, but you are collaborating with a for profit partner. I'm sure they want to see certain amounts of impact statements and things like that. How do you guys think about how you measure your success?

00:22:50:19 - 00:23:14:23

Paul Jurasin

Yeah, so we measure our success really on the impact we are having on on the customer, right? If we can if we can solve a problem that really has an impact on someone's life, you know, and we like to say that we're trying to impact the lives of citizens, that's really our goal. That's how we measure that. So we look at all of our time challenges.

00:23:14:23 - 00:23:31:29

Paul Jurasin

We've worked on. We worked on, I don't know, 100 or so to see if it's really making a difference. And when we in our governance process does this too, right? So we won't we won't accept a project that we don't think is going to have very much impact. The idea being if someone brings us a project and we look at it and we say, you know what?

00:23:31:29 - 00:23:51:03

Paul Jurasin

If we solve this problem for this customer, it's also going to solve the problem for these other 5000 thousand customers out there. That's going to move to top our list, right? We want we want our solutions to be replicable. So we really do look at that sort of thing. But sometimes it's not so much that they're replicable across lots of different organizations.

00:23:51:05 - 00:24:18:14

Paul Jurasin

Sometimes we'll look at a problem and it'll have impact on. It might only be one organization that is solving the problem, but it might impact 50,000 people or a million people. In that case, that moves up to the top of those two. So we have a relationship with the World Bank data lab, and the World Bank data lab kind of covers a big portion of World Bank and the activities they do in various parts of the world.

00:24:18:16 - 00:24:46:02

Paul Jurasin

One of the projects we worked on with them is a Safer Schools infrastructure project, where we use machine learning artificial intelligence to be able to identify dangerous school buildings that may be affected by earthquakes in various parts of the world. So we can't they can't send engineers to a million school buildings around the country, around the world, but they can have people take photos of them.

00:24:46:04 - 00:25:07:12

Paul Jurasin

So when people take photos of them, we have the technology that will save this type of building in this area is susceptible to earthquake damage if there's an earthquake, and then they'll send engineers to those buildings. So that's that's a project that we think is really going to save a lot of lives. If we can get those buildings, address the ones that are really causing problems.

00:25:07:14 - 00:25:28:03

Lisa Thee

So your your leveraging AI and ML in a way that you can help to prioritize where you applied scarce resources to have the optimal impact for the benefit of humans, the human population. And that's something we're really obsessed with at launch consulting as well as if we're not doing it to benefit humans. Why are we doing it?

00:25:28:06 - 00:25:29:08

Paul Jurasin

Yeah, right.

00:25:29:11 - 00:25:31:04

Lisa Thee

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

00:25:31:07 - 00:26:01:09

Paul Jurasin

Yeah. So this particular project and many that we work on, you know, sometimes will work on challenges like that one in Santa monica that I talked about. Where will you use a kind of our, our hub team who is on site and has some expertise to work on challenges like that with the Safer Schools infrastructure Project. It was a little bit different in that we brought in computer science faculty who had expertise in machine learning and artificial intelligence and and brought in students that were working in his class to work on many of these projects.

00:26:01:11 - 00:26:12:23

Paul Jurasin

So they got experience working with the World Bank and looking at what the problem was on the ground in various countries around the world, and then putting that solution together and and planning that back to World Bank as their solution.

00:26:12:26 - 00:26:16:22

Lisa Thee

But they were in heaven having access to all that real world data.

00:26:16:24 - 00:26:17:10

Paul Jurasin

Oh, man.

00:26:17:10 - 00:26:43:06

Lisa Thee

Yeah, yeah. And the World Bank, I'm sure, recognize the value of having people that are currently learning the technology and are current in the academics of it because it evolves so quickly that it's really important to have the freshest, most current information. So having somebody that is in still in that schooling environment, they're going to have access to the latest and greatest methods of addressing problems, right?

00:26:43:08 - 00:27:00:27

Paul Jurasin

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, having giving our students that ability to, first of all, work with the World Bank personnel who are on the ground, you know, in various parts of the world and have a lot of expertise with, you know, whatever happens to be going on there. So they get access to those people and the data that are collected out there.

00:27:01:00 - 00:27:16:04

Paul Jurasin

So having that international experience, along with the technology and innovation experience, really provides a great background for these students who are then going to graduate and go off into the world and work on various things. But they have that in their back pocket and they walk out.

00:27:16:06 - 00:27:35:16

Lisa Thee

Absolutely. So can you share some of the common mistakes people make when they're trying to approach innovation that the rest of us can learn from to spare us from wasting time? Because I think there's probably a couple of common pitfalls that people assume. You can take shortcuts here and here that don't usually play out in the end.

00:27:35:18 - 00:28:03:28

Paul Jurasin

Yeah, that's true. Yeah. There's a couple that I can I can bring up here. One I think we talked a little bit about already is trying to bring in technology too soon into a problem solution effort. So, you know, we, we try to be careful. This is a lesson learned that we learned to ourselves is that, you know you really you really do want to understand the customer around the problem first before you decide you're going to bring in technology.

00:28:04:01 - 00:28:27:13

Paul Jurasin

In many cases, you know, you don't you don't need the amount of technology you thought you needed. Another hackathon. On the other hand, many cases you don't understand the problem, right? So if you go and say, I'm gonna build this really cool thing because I think it's going to fix this problem, maybe, maybe not. So ideally, you would take the the innovation process to understand the problem and customer first to bring in the technology stack up.

00:28:27:16 - 00:28:50:13

Paul Jurasin

So that's why the second piece that we've seen on several projects and another lesson learned for us is that to solve some problems that we work on, many of them actually requires good data, right? Someone has had to go and collect good data for us to do some analysis on it, to do analytics and figure out what trends look like.

00:28:50:15 - 00:29:09:02

Paul Jurasin

And sometimes they have the right idea that they really want to do what they think they want to do, but they don't have the data to do it. And if you don't have good data to do it, you can't do it. So one of the first questions we were we've learned to ask when we're working with a customer is do you have data that we can use for this?

00:29:09:05 - 00:29:15:05

Paul Jurasin

Or at least if you don't have data, can you go collect it in some way? So that's not the way it.

00:29:15:05 - 00:29:55:02

Lisa Thee

Is usually required, because I think that that's kind of a big mystery to people, right? Like, I like to ground that down into the next step of actionable for people. And the reason I'm asking these questions very specifically is as a consultancy, we're often coming into private sector customers with very similar challenges and so there is like a bar for entry and sometimes it's not as accessible to the existing talent within the company because it's not their domain expertise to collect data, ingest the data, clean the data and get it in a pipeline where it actually can be looked at by the next the next people to collaborate with, right?

00:29:55:04 - 00:30:21:03

Paul Jurasin

Totally. Yeah. And of course, dance floor probably is the more data, the better. But I know, but you know, in the end there are ways to to format different different kinds of data so that it can be analyzed against other kinds of data. But that that adds time and effort, as you say, in many cases, you know, because we're still like I said, we're right.

00:30:21:05 - 00:30:48:24

Paul Jurasin

We're working on prototypes of these solutions, not final production solutions. You know, we don't necessarily need a full dataset of millions and millions of records, but it is important to have at least a good enough set of records that are representative of what all the data is going to look like. And many times we can just go back to the customer and say, You know what, you really need to collect more data in this format.

00:30:48:26 - 00:30:53:26

Paul Jurasin

For us to be able to come up with a good solution for you. And that's valuable for them too.

00:30:53:28 - 00:31:17:03

Lisa Thee

Yeah, that's incredibly helpful because I think a lot of people get stuck in that. I want to go do something to how do I have something that can demonstrate to all of my stakeholders that if we invest this time it's going to be value added and having something they can touch and feel like a prototype or a proof of concept or something that says this vision I have is actually achievable.

00:31:17:03 - 00:31:28:20

Lisa Thee

And here's how like kind of how it might benefit you. And do you like it? Is there something we could do better? Is the way that people get on board, They they get emotionally invested in that, right?

00:31:28:22 - 00:31:58:13

Paul Jurasin

Totally. You know, getting people to actually get their hands on, you know, at least a vision of the solution makes a big difference. You know, we we start with visuals after our innovation workshops, right? So we're just drawing cartoons, basically, of what we think the solution looks like. And there's the reason we do that. So as we write documents as well, But it's much easier for someone to look at a cartoon strip with six segments and say, Oh, I see what they're trying to do here, takes me 2 minutes.

00:31:58:13 - 00:32:02:22

Paul Jurasin

I get it. You a lot of people don't want to go read a 1515 page document to do that.

00:32:02:22 - 00:32:04:05

Lisa Thee

So I don't.

00:32:04:07 - 00:32:23:01

Paul Jurasin

Know. And so so we have those visuals where people can actually understand what we're trying to do in that. And even with those kinds of visuals, it's easy for the customer to say that's in frame four. That's not really how that works. You know, we really go and do this other thing instead and we can just do it in the in the cartoon, basically.

00:32:23:03 - 00:32:47:26

Paul Jurasin

And once we get that whole visual set, then we can start working on the real prototype in digital format so we can get it to be much more real. And we do, you know, weekly sprints, we get back to the customer, you know, once, once every week, maybe two weeks, and say, okay, here's what we've done and just what you were thinking it going to be, because the last thing you want to do is spend a month working on something and pay to the customer.

00:32:47:26 - 00:32:52:11

Paul Jurasin

And they're like, No, that's nothing. What I thought was going to be. So we do a lot of that as well.

00:32:52:13 - 00:33:13:05

Lisa Thee

So you do you apply the Agile methodology using EPICS and sprints so that people can have opportunities to come in as stakeholders and influence the direction of it as it's going versus waiting for it to come out of the oven six months later and going, Oh, now I was trying to get something over here. This is not quite what I was looking for, right?

00:33:13:08 - 00:33:36:13

Paul Jurasin

Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, another thing we find is that as we start working on a particular problem that someone has, we'll start with those workshops and we'll find out that, you know what, We can't solve that problem until you solve this problem and this problem first. That happens a lot, actually. Just, you know, we drive out a lot of challenges from that initial problem statement.

00:33:36:20 - 00:33:41:04

Paul Jurasin

And in many cases we have to solve two or three other problems before we can get to that. One, we were looking and.

00:33:41:06 - 00:34:02:22

Lisa Thee

That's a great. Protip So going through a structured innovation process with a team of diverse stakeholders allows you to really get to the order of the problems that you have to solve. So that you're not solving. Problem number three, not realizing that if you change the variables and problem one and problem to your solution is going to get thrown out anyways, right?

00:34:02:25 - 00:34:05:14

Paul Jurasin

Yeah, totally.

00:34:05:16 - 00:34:47:00

Lisa Thee

And I think it's important for people to think through as you're thinking about the data that you need to solve some of your problems. It doesn't necessarily have to be your own data. I know in my experience when we were innovating at Intel around trying to improve the outcomes for missing children and being able to do image matching between the missing children's posters and some public advertisements online for people's faces, some of the challenges we saw were that, you know, that the lighting and the makeup and all the other elements of the polished advertising online was very divergent from the grainy low grade pictures that were provided from missing children's posters.

00:34:47:03 - 00:35:15:06

Lisa Thee

And so we were able to help get buy in from the overall audience that people that had to make the investment to do the innovation within the company by creating a game where we took public data from the Internet of child celebrities, it's labeled, it's easily accessible. There's no compliance issues with harvesting data from children involved in it at all, has the right copyright of approval to be used.

00:35:15:13 - 00:35:36:20

Lisa Thee

And we were able to make a simple, simple game where somebody could try to find matches or pictures, and then we'd just start increasing the number of pictures you have to dig through to find the match, and then we'd have them do it all over again with machine learning and computer, and they could see just how much faster they could do it with, you know, And it was still them.

00:35:36:22 - 00:36:07:06

Lisa Thee

It was still them making the final decisions. The humans were still doing what the humans do well, but we are giving them the empathy training of what it feels like to be a detective scrolling through 50,000 faces, trying to find one kid versus going to a tool that organized the faces of those 50,000 children and descending order of most likely match and recognizing that your kid was always on the top line on the first pass.

00:36:07:08 - 00:36:10:10

Lisa Thee

It doesn't have to be perfect to be useful, right?

00:36:10:13 - 00:36:41:24

Paul Jurasin

Oh, no. Yeah, that's absolutely right. You know what I found over the time that we've been doing a lot of this work is that, you know, back to what I was saying before is that a lot of the really smart people that we work with work for government organizations, what happens, I think, though, is that when government organizations and not only government organizations, private companies as well, work on innovating, they don't have a structured methodology to do that.

00:36:41:26 - 00:37:02:21

Paul Jurasin

So one of the things we're trying to do when we work with various organizations is to really teach them how to bring in an innovation methodology and use it on all of their problems so everyone knows what they're doing, right? So there's a hundred different ways to innovate, but you don't want to do innovation in 100 different ways in your organization because it's super inefficient.

00:37:02:24 - 00:37:15:19

Paul Jurasin

It can be really efficient if you all use the same way. We think our methodology is good. It's probably not the only one, but use one, learn how to do it, and then you can implement that innovation methodology in your organization and really get things done.

00:37:15:19 - 00:37:48:18

Lisa Thee

I think and that's actually a lot of what I hear from our customers. So in my day job leading our data for good practice, a lot of times we are bringing in frameworks to think through what are the problem sets you're you're solving from the different stakeholders perspective. We we're doing the empathy mapping, we're doing the service blueprint saying of how do we bring people along that customer journey and just being able to see it all on one piece of paper really allows people to help to align on the Y people that they're working with or asking them to do what they're asking them to do.

00:37:48:20 - 00:38:13:05

Lisa Thee

And it's amazing how much resistance and alignment can come to the surface when you take that time upfront versus working in these five times and working as fast as humanly possible, throwing it over the wall and then having somebody just be like, Well, I don't feel like using it, which happens all the time. And it's just unfortunate because it wouldn't have been worth sourcing the project had it not been important.

00:38:13:08 - 00:38:30:12

Lisa Thee

And so having a structured methodology and sometimes maybe bring in some external help to help facilitate that, a people that don't have any dogs in the fight that are just there to help you walk along that journey can be transformational for executive teams all the way down.

00:38:30:15 - 00:38:58:24

Paul Jurasin

Yeah, yeah. One of the things that we see too is that when we bring in these representatives of organizations who are helping us solve the challenges, we'll have our students in those and those workshops as well who know almost nothing about what the problem is until they walk into that. And what we find in a lot of cases, the best ideas that we come up with come from the students who don't know anything about what the problem is because they don't have any constraints.

00:38:58:26 - 00:39:15:08

Paul Jurasin

Right. People who are working on have been working on a problem for five years, ten years. They have all these constraints that say, you know, I couldn't do that before, so we're not going to try that anymore. And the students come back and say, Oh, why don't you do this and why don't you do this? And we were like, Oh yeah, why not?

00:39:15:15 - 00:39:21:08

Paul Jurasin

Let's do that, you know? So the best ideas come from students who really don't don't know anything about the problem.

00:39:21:11 - 00:39:24:23

Lisa Thee

Yeah, that beginner's mindset is a right.

00:39:24:23 - 00:39:25:20

Paul Jurasin

Absolutely.

00:39:25:23 - 00:39:48:02

Lisa Thee

Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Well, it's been an absolute pleasure talking with you today, Paul. I really appreciate you demystifying how the public and private sectors are coming together to solve big challenges at Cal Poly. For anybody that's interested in submitting, submitting a challenge to be considered or is interested in following the innovation work and having access to the open source information that you guys are putting out there.

00:39:48:08 - 00:39:51:06

Lisa Thee

Do you mind sharing how people can find out more information?

00:39:51:08 - 00:40:09:07

Paul Jurasin

Yeah, the best way to do that is to go to our web site, which is the X Hub dot cal poly dot edu. And if you go to that website, you'll find my email address. You can email me my phone numbers or you can call me. But what you can also do is you can see all of the projects we've worked on so far.

00:40:09:07 - 00:40:24:23

Paul Jurasin

There's a little description of them and there's a link to all of the code that we've written and all of the vision documents are written as well. So you can take a look at that in detail. Even better, if you happen to have a problem that matches one of ours, take that solution and go implement it. That'd be great.

00:40:24:25 - 00:40:30:22

Lisa Thee

Love it. Thank you so much for your time today, Paul, and thank you for what you're contributing to human impact.

00:40:30:25 - 00:40:33:29

Paul Jurasin

Thanks, Lisa. Appreciate it.

00:40:34:01 - 00:40:34:29

Paul Jurasin

Hey, everyone.

00:40:35:02 - 00:40:45:01

Narrator

Thanks for listening to the Navigating Forward podcast. We'd love to hear from you. At a crossroads of uncertainty and opportunity, how do you navigate forward? We'll see you next time.