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Executive Interview: How Complexity Kills Innovation and Lasting IT Leadership with Kurt Telep

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I'm Drex Deford, president of Cyber and Risk here at this week, health and the 2 29 Project. Our mission is Healthcare Transformation powered by community. Welcome to this executive interview on the UnHack Channel. Real conversations about managing risk at the highest levels.

Let's dive in.[00:01:00]

Drex DeFord: Hey everyone. I'm Drex welcome to the show.

Glad you're here today. I, I've got a really great treat today. I think Kurt Telep, the healthcare field, CTO from Nutanix is here with me today. Say hi, Kurt.

Kurt Telep: Hi everybody.

Drex DeFord: It's good to see you. We had a quick little chat before we got started. You've spent. Tons of times. Years. We both have the gray beard.

Kurt Telep: Yes. The gray beard and the bald head. Right.

Drex DeFord: You've spent years at the intersection of healthcare and technology. What originally kind of pulled you into the space? What's kept you hooked in the space?

Kurt Telep: I've been in the IT industry for, gosh, I'm going on. Almost 25 years now that I've been working in it.

Right. And I had a lot more hair when I first started. And I cut my teeth on mainframe and as 400 in the world of commercial, you know, SAP, business computing. And over the years I just found that helping companies push more widgets out of their factories every day wasn't doing it for me anymore.

Mm-hmm. And I had an [00:02:00] opportunity when I was at EMC to kind of specialize in healthcare. And I've always felt, and one of the things that I love about healthcare is I can tie back what we do in infrastructure, what we do in it. To truly helping patients. Truly helping clinicians, right? Helping an organization.

I like to tell people, you know, through my career I have been that engineer that's pounding away trying to get something fixed while I have somebody, you know, a charge nurse over my shoulder yelling at me. because a wristband, printer's not working. When's it gonna be fixed? When's it gonna be fixed?

Right. But I've also been at the director level and the manager level, and now I'm at a, an architect and a in infrastructure design level where. I'm the one that's helping to keep those problems to occur even in the first place.

Drex DeFord: it is a great mission and I think that's why all of us kind of love it.

It is a direct connect to patients and families now more than ever, right?

Kurt Telep: Yes, absolutely.

Drex DeFord: You see a lot of healthcare systems wrestling with modernization and. Harmonization across a number of platforms, all the things that kind of go with that. What's the [00:03:00] biggest gap between how leaders think about infrastructure and how infrastructure actually drives outcomes?

Kurt Telep: Something that's happened. I, and I've seen this over the years within healthcare. I used to be able to walk into a shop 10 years ago and talk to the IT administrator, talk to the person that was, you know, supporting the backend infrastructure of the EMR and say, Hey. Have you talked to the end users?

Do you know what's actually happening? At the clinician level, and they used to be able to tell And I think that we've added so much infrastructure, so many layers between it and the clinician and the patient, that there's a loss of sight of that. Right. There's a, well, I do this thing, I create these virtual machines, or I build this infrastructure.

But I don't really understand what's the true impact to the patient. And then when I come in and start talking about, hey, I can improve, you know, deployment times by X or, you know, image retrieval times impacts by Y and this is what the real impact is to your patients.

It opens up a lot of options, right?

So I think we've kinda lost [00:04:00] sight of. The complexity of healthcare IT and how that's impacting the patient experience on LinkedIn.

Drex DeFord: So taking the tech conversation and kind of reframing it. In a way that helps them understand this is way more than just infrastructure and plumbing. Exactly. It actually affects the patients and family..

Kurt Telep: A hundred percent. I love, you know, one of the things that I really enjoy, I think I'm one of the few people that does enjoy working at the booth at a conference, right? Whether it's a local HIMSS event or it's a, you know, chime or one of the many different, you know, healthcare IT institute, pick one of the major conferences.

I love working at the booth and then having conversations with informatics folks like informatics is a gold opportunity for a lot of healthcare IT folks to get a real understanding of what's the problem the end user is seeing. Uhhuh. It's a blessing and a curse because they've put a position in there that's separated it, but now we need to actually interact with that person.

Drex DeFord: It's a translator

Kurt Telep: Yes. I take the requirements from the people and I give 'em to the [00:05:00] engineers. The old

Drex DeFord: office and back and forth. I take what can be done by the engineers and I translate it back to the the capability.

I can't get outta here. Of course, without talking about ai.

Kurt Telep: Oh, nobody can.

Drex DeFord: I know every conversation, so I was like, I'm gonna, do I bring it up? Do I let you bring it up? Here's what I wanna know for healthcare IT teams. This is a pretty broad question, so you can take it in a lot of different ways for healthcare IT teams.

What's real right now and what's hype, and maybe that way to answer this, you think about how you want to answer it. I'm gonna ask you maybe a follow up question to it.

Kurt Telep: When we started to see AI show up in healthcare it, and of course everybody's asking me what's gonna happen with this?

You know, let's go back to a year and a half, two years ago where GPT really started to get wild and we started to be in the public eye, right? I told our leadership and I spoke to folks, I said, you know, most healthcare is gonna leverage AI initially with something that's coming out of the box from their existing vendors.

University health systems, your [00:06:00] research health systems, they're gonna partner with AI companies and they're gonna be the ones that are gonna be building their own models and deploying, you know, true developed endpoints. For API use cases, but 95% of your healthcare organizations, they're gonna need to consume AI as a workload, right?

Drex DeFord: Yeah. We used to talk about this as it's a feature, it's not.

Kurt Telep: Yes,

Drex DeFord: exactly. Yeah.

Kurt Telep: Right. So the challenge in healthcare AI to do what's real versus what's fantasy is in many cases we need to look at AI as a true workload, which means that we need to design, we need to implement, provide infrastructure to run that workload based on its requirements.

And not get caught up in the hype of, well, you could build your own models and look at all these amazing tools that you can make. Most health center organizations are not gonna go down that road, right? But the challenge is, even to run those out of the box packaged AI tools, you still see need the models, you still need the skillset.

You still need to bring the [00:07:00] education in order to make them a reality within your infrastructure. I think that, you know, for years, healthcare has been fighting, bringing things like containerization into the data center.

Drex DeFord: Yeah.

Kurt Telep: I think AI is gonna drag it kicking and screaming, right? Because all of your AI tools are gonna be container-based.

It's just the nature of that application workload. And we're gonna end up with a lot of healthcare IT engineers and IT departments that are gonna become instantaneous required to be a Kubernetes expert. Which is gonna bring a whole new slew of infrastructure and security and availability and reliability challenges into the data center. When we talk about AI and we talk about bringing in Kubernetes workloads, that truly is just another workload for Nutanix. So we have things like our NKP and N AI that make it so you can click of a button, turnkey, deploy those workloads and have them available for the developers, whether it's internal developers, external developers, or you're just running an AI application and you [00:08:00] need to run that workload.

Something that we make really simple to do.

Drex DeFord: Does the AI make that transition any easier? You know, of course you have to do it because of the workload, but does AI itself make that transition easier?

Kurt Telep: It definitely can, right? Yeah. When we start to look at bringing things like agentic AI into the management and the deployment of tooling within the data center.

When we start to not just introduce new workloads without introducing new tools to support those workloads, we're bound to fail, right? So, bringing AI alongside to help our engineers support those workloads is definitely going to be key. It's all about simplifying infrastructure over time and not ignoring the tools that are available to us.

Drex DeFord: So in my background, I'm gonna ask you about security. Tell me about how security plays into all this.

Kurt Telep: The biggest challenge with AI in any use case is going to be where is the data live. And who has access to the data and [00:09:00] how do we wrap governance around it, right?

Mm-hmm. And we can go down a very long rattle about ownership of data also, right?

Drex DeFord: Yes.

Kurt Telep: But there is a a big challenge in if I'm leveraging a third party ai. Which components of my data is it safe to put into that ai, whether it's being used for a model or if it's just being used for query.

I had a very terrifying discussion at an event with A CMIO who was talking about copying and pasting healthcare data into Chachi pt.

Drex DeFord: Yeah.

Kurt Telep: And I just, my whole face as su, he said it just drops. Yes. And he went, oh, I probably shouldn't have talked about that.

Drex DeFord: Yeah.

Kurt Telep: But those are the security challenges.

Well, there's gonna be a data security challenge, not from a bad actor for just somebody who's not knowledgeable, doesn't realize what they're getting into.

Drex DeFord: Yeah. Not bad intention, it's just somebody who's trying to get their work done and unfortunately they're making a mistake.

Kurt Telep: And if I have a tool that helps me get my work done faster, I'm absolutely going to take advantage of it, right?

And then the other piece is simply just [00:10:00] maintaining your data footprint and making sure that you've secured and you know, where all your data is living at any point in time, whether it's on-prem, whether it's in the cloud, if it's part of a data set that's been used to train or that you're using to query.

Just the simple awareness of where does my data live today is a huge impactful difference.

Drex DeFord: Every leader has a moment where their perspective shifts When you know, you you change your mind about something that you always thought was true. This was my bedrock. I was positive this was true.

I've made all my decisions based on this thing, and then you change your mind. If you could go back and tell your younger self one thing about working in healthcare it something that you figured out that you wish you would've known when you were younger, what's the thing that you would tell them?

Kurt Telep: I would absolutely tell them Spend the time learning the new technology. It's not gonna be there tomorrow, but it's gonna be [00:11:00] there in a year, right? There are times in my career where I said I'm gonna be very laser focused on what's in the now. I've kind of pushed aside, and I'll tell you right now, it was Kubernetes for me. I said, you know, I'm a systems engineer.

Those container things are cool, but they're scary because they're a little more complex. Right. I'm gonna focus on traditional workloads and how I run and manage traditional workloads and I have healthcare IT folks I talk to now that are like, yeah, containers are scary. But I had to make that change when I started to see that.

There are these workloads that are coming into healthcare. We're starting to need containers, and now I'm last minute, relearning those things, right? And I'm trying to build the connection. So I think it's as important it is to focus on where you're at today and the infrastructure and the requirements, the skills that I need today.

Do not forget about that new technology that's on the horizon. And even if it's an hour a week, even if it's two hours a month. Spend the time to learn it, be interested in it, and [00:12:00] understand it, because it's gonna show up faster than you think. it is

Drex DeFord: I think, sometimes too you're working on a problem and your head's down and you're focused on that problem.

Do you find sometimes that like when you're doing what you're talking about, you're watching new technology come along, it starts to change. You're like, I'm not even gonna solve it. Like, like I think I'm gonna solve it. Like, we need to start leaning in, you know, beyond the curvature of the earth.

Like, here comes this thing. Yeah, let's try something completely different and new. You see that same thing

Kurt Telep: I've done it and I talk to customers now and pros, prospective customers about that. Right. We are at a lot of crossroads in healthcare it, and when I sit down and talk to somebody about a different way of operating their healthcare system, for years we've said a cloud is not a place, it's an operating model. And when I sit and say. Let me show you how you can operate your on-prem infrastructure as if it is the same as a cloud operating model.

Drex DeFord: Yeah.

Kurt Telep: And actually do it for real and say, if we [00:13:00] take your workloads today and we bring them into this model, it's not just taking something from point a, picking up and putting it down.

Right. It's about changing your mindset on, you know, pets versus cattle. I'm managing hundreds of thousands of machines versus individually taking care and feeding of them. And there's transitions that need to occur there. In education, there's transitions that need to occur in the model of management.

And you have to, at some point in time rip off that bandaid and say, this is the right way to do this. And I can show you tens of folks that are managing things like PAX workloads in the non-traditional methodology and what they get out of doing that and the value of doing that. Right.

Drex DeFord: Change is hard.

Yeah,

Kurt Telep: change is

Drex DeFord: hard. Oh yeah.

Kurt Telep: Change is very hard. People are scared of change.

Drex DeFord: How do you make those people who are on the leading edge, how do you make them champions and get them to star status so that everybody else will go along?

Kurt Telep: So probably the two biggest things that I do when I'm working with the [00:14:00] champion is I make sure that I do lift them up, right?

Like, I don't want people to be a champion in the corner, right? Because a lot of times, and this, and by the way, this was me when I was. On the implementation side, and when I actually was a customer I was very bright. I did a lot of amazing things, but I wasn't lifted up to, to know and understand that I was somebody that was doing these amazing things, right?

Yeah. So I think lifting up, helping 'em understand and then empowering them and giving 'em the confidence to have the conversations higher within their organization, right? Because not everybody knows how to. Discuss their achievements. Not everybody is comfortable raising their hand say, there's a better way to do this.

Right. And in some cases it's been, Hey, let me help you build the content for your conversation, Uhhuh, and then we'll work through it together. You can practice with me.

Drex DeFord: They don't want the limelight sometimes too, right? They don't wanna be a ball hog or they don't wanna feel like they're self-promoting.

I have this conversation with somebody the other day and it was like, it's not about you. [00:15:00]

Kurt Telep: Right?

Drex DeFord: Like, get over it. It's not about you. It's about the thing that everybody could do better if you would just talk about it.

Kurt Telep: Going all the way back to the beginning of our conversation here, right? Most of the people that work in healthcare it are there because of the mission.

Let's be honest, healthcare, it is not the highest paid vertical in it. Mm-hmm. So you have a lot of people there for the mission. So talking to that champion about, hey, if. We're doing something really great here. Let me talk to you about how this is gonna make the mission of the hospital, the mission of the health system, the mission of the FQHC or the long-term care facility.

Let me show you that side. This isn't, as you said about you, it's about making things better for the clinicians and patients that helps get them over that hump and that fear that they have to go promote whatever we're talking about.

Drex DeFord: One quick last question. If you could whisper one piece of advice in a CIO's ear about the future and what's coming and how they can better engage with it, what would the piece [00:16:00] of advice be?

Kurt Telep: Focus on simplicity. Just because something is simple does not mean it's Fisher-Price. My first data center, right? Focus on platforms that provide you with integration. You're not gonna get more funding for people. You may not get better people, you may not be able to educate all your people. So as you're looking towards the future, focus on platforms and tools and operating models that simplify what you're doing today so you can continue to leverage the resources that you have, whether they're technology resources or people resources.

Honestly, that's one of the primary reasons that I came to Nutanix. I love being at Nutanix. I mean, through my whole interview process, I was like, this thing seems like it's magic. Just because of how simple the platform was built,

Drex DeFord: it's easier to run. It's easier to secure. It's less likely to go down.

All the things. Yeah,

Kurt Telep: even things like security, right? Like I love chatting about security because I think security is one of those things. There's a lot of shelfware [00:17:00] in the security world. Oh man. When you look at how Nutanix has implemented security controls, when you look at how we have implemented things like microsegmentation and all these technologies that people buy into, they go, I absolutely have to have it.

Then it takes a massive team of people to deploy and make it work, right? When we make it, so you click a button and things happen, right? That's a tool that's going to get used. It's a simple tool that provides functionality and it's throughout the whole platform, which means that, you know, I can have.

Somebody that's a level one system administrator creating virtual machines, whether they're in the cloud or on-prem, and actually make all the security requirements hit on those VMs without having to involve somebody who's a very senior security engineer.

Drex DeFord: Yeah,

Kurt Telep: and that goes all the way back.

That's why simplicity is so important, right? Being able to have a simple way to implement and use the tooling that you're providing to your IT team, then you're not gonna have shelfware that you wasted money on either.

Drex DeFord: Yeah. I love that advice. You're singing my song. I appreciate it. I talk about simplicity all the [00:18:00] time.

Kurt, Telep Healthcare Field CTO for Nutanix. Thanks for being on the show today.

Kurt Telep: Yeah, so glad to be here. Thank you so much.

Thanks for joining this executive interview on UnHack with me Drex Deford here this week. Health, we believe every healthcare leader needs a community to lean on and learn from. Build your network at this week, health.com/subscribe and share this with a colleague because together we're stronger.