#298 - Avoiding Common Pitfalls in IAM RFPs

You have to actually understand the area before you can put together a good set of requirements. And so I think that's where maybe that RFI really can help because you don't know what's out there. You don't know what are the standard set of requirements. Obviously if you start putting the other requirements like the system must be able to levitate above the ground, like no system showing to meet that. So you have to have. But it's in the cloud, it levitates automatically.

Yes, this is identity at the center. If it has anything to do with IAM, this is the go to podcast now your hosts Jim McDonald and Jeff Steadman. Welcome to the Identity at the Center podcast. I'm Jeff, and that's Jim. Hey, Jim. Hey, Jeff, how are you? Oh, not so bad yourself. And it's been quite a week and it's only Monday already. It's been quite a day. It's I'm on mountain time.

So part of my challenge they off the bat is that 6:00 AM is 8:00 AM. And by the time that I get everything together, it's like 7:00 AM and the world is like full speed and I'm not ready. Well, here's a pro tip for consulting. Don't live in the West Coast because everything's going to be done in Eastern Time. Or just embrace the early life and the early release, I guess,

right. People kind of disappear probably around 3:00 PM, you know, for, for folks on the West Coast. But yeah, that's that's life. Yeah, exactly, Exactly. I don't think I could do it. You know, I thought about, you know, moving to Hawaii or something and it would be great, but you'd have to get up so dark early to have like 2:00 in the morning, 3:00 in the morning, That's not going to work for me. Well, if you're moving to Hawaii, you you probably can just set your own schedule at

that point. Yeah, right. You've saved up your pennies. Exactly. So you have a little bit of different background.

You're, you must be travelling right. You said you're. Travelling. I'm in Sturgis, SD and so my partner Denise direct here. This is actually her family home and you know, this house he built in the 60s, late 60s. And yeah, I mean, so it's, you know, 8 foot ceilings and everything and, and it's a it's a great home. I feel really comfortable here. And then of course, what's going on in surgery, South Dakota is they have the big motorcycle rally every year and it's pretty

crazy, man. I have a motorcycle I ride, but there are motorcycle enthusiasts here who, you know, come from all parts of the world. Most of people come in from the United States and ride their bikes, and it's pretty crazy, man. There's like hundreds of thousands of motorcycles here. Sounds very loud. It's super loud. It's super loud on top of all the rock'n'roll music that your heart could desire.

And there's a big concert right too, that kind of goes along with this bunch of. There's a lot of big concerts. Yeah, Last night we saw someone named Elle King. Oh yeah. That's functional. Yeah, she's like a country star. She's really good. Jelly Roll's going to be here this week. Travis Trait is here last night. Is anybody good going to be? There Kid Rock was he's going to be here. I like Kid Rock. I like Jelly Roll. I like Travis Strait. It sounds like.

Country, but well, there's a lot of, you know, cover bands, Bret Michaels is going to be here. So it's a lot of like there's just like that would appeal to like motorcycle folks and a lot of the people I think could ride motorcycles. Well, there's, there's really a big age range, but there are definitely a lot of people with, you know, Gray hair. It sounds it sounds like a very interesting event. Are there any electric bikes? That's what would interest me.

Any E bikes like electric motorcycles? A single one. I haven't seen a single one. Is that interesting? The bikes, the bikes I like a lot are the custom bikes where people go and like, you know. They can put the handles out like like this, but I don't get that like that doesn't seem very comfortable. We're safe, right? Yeah. I don't know, man. That's why I don't have time riding my regular motorcycle. I don't think I can ride

something like that. I'm not a gear head, so I'm more interested in the technology sides. That's why I asked about the the electric, you know, bike meaning like the electric motorcycle. That seems like that'd be pretty. Cool. Yeah, I did see a a Tesla charger somewhere. And of course, that'd be immediately like Jeff be hanging out there. Wait, you have to have a place to charge? You know what you gonna do? All right, so you're in Sturgis, you're on the road.

I'm on the road like every day for this month, if you like, except for maybe a couple. So it's made scheduling this podcast extremely challenging. So hats off to you for pulling this together. We're going to try and make this show a little bit shorter, just the interest of time and making sure that we put something out that's quality.

But I do want to give a shout out a gentleman by the name of Ron sent in an e-mail or Ronald sent in a contact form to us and notice there was a bug at our website. I've been chasing this bug for a long time and if I was like I thought, I thought I had it fixed, well now I think I have

it fixed again. So if you have been using our listen page on our website and then you would refresh, what would happen is you'd go to a four O 4 page because for some reason it kept looping around to a page that no longer existed as I was doing some work on the site. I think I have fixed it again so we'll see how it works, but shout out to Ron for noticing the bug and actually taking the time to send in a a, you know, a message to let us know about it

and I will cross my fingers. Hopefully it is now fixed again. My shout out to Ron is like, I just heard that bug like six months ago, Jeff, and I told you about it and. I thought I had to. Fix it. It's my fault, yeah. It's it's, it's usually, it's, it's, it's usually the user, right? ID 10 T probably or PEP CAC, right, something like that. So, OK, well, shout to him. Let's see what else we got. Identity Week coming up. You and I are going to be there.

We're starting to figure out what that plan is going to look like. I'll be hosting sort of a hour long panel talk, question and answer type thing for the future of identity and access management. So you'll see that that session is now up on the Identity Week America agenda. So hopefully people will come out and check that out. If you do, we have discount code. So if you use the code Ida C30, they get you 30% off of your identity week registration.

And that's good for both the America Conference which is September 11th and 12th in Washington, DC and the Asia conference which is in Singapore, October 22nd, 23rd. So Ida C30 type that in you get 30% off and shows support for shows support for the show. Easy for me to say and I appreciate that. Same thing for the Authenticate conference that's coming up. Also, October. It's going to be a very busy couple months for you.

For you and I, Jim, October 14th through 16 in Carlsbad, CA Love it. Great spot. ID AC15, you get 15% off of your Authenticate registration, so we will be there. We originally were going to record a session with Andrew Schickier.

He had some travel things pop up over the weekend, so if you saw his notes on LinkedIn, I was like, oh, oh, that might be a problem for us. But we're going to have him back on here in the next couple of weeks and get something out to kind of talk about the the next authenticate conference in a little more detail with him. So with that business out of the way, I think the other thing we want to take today was we got a really good question from a listener and we're basically

going to take this entire talk. The rest of the time we have to talk about that one question and maybe get into a little bit more detail, but try to keep it sort of on rails for us. So that's where we're at. Anything else you want to get before we get to our? Question. No. Just thinking of something now with all the the trouble nightmares moving on. Just, you know, 4th, 3rd wall or third wall or 4th wall. Anyway, 4th wall hurricane moving through the southeast as

we speak. Right now it's getting very close to Augusta, GA, which is right there. HomeAway frame. It's where I live now, so we're right on. The edge, like I looked at the path today and it's like you're just outside of it and I'm just outside of a Nashville. We're kind of like 2 hours apart from that same size. Depending on the trajectory, we could either totally miss it, totally get hit, or somewhere in between. Yeah, and I've been lucky for

the past few years here. I haven't gotten hit by one, but yeah, but the I haven't been watching it all day. It's been one of these things. But I, yeah, I think at one point it was like we're in the dead on center path. Yeah, Well, hopefully we'll see. I mean, I'm flying out to New York tomorrow night. And so this is, let's see what's what's today. Today is Monday the 5th and so I'm flying out Tuesday the 6th. To where am I going?

Minneapolis. And so as long as my flight leaves on time, I don't care at that point. Then you're happy and then I'm happy to get there first thing. Yep, got to get that for a couple days and then headed to Dallas for this weekend for some fun personal time with friends and then, yeah, back to reality Monday or Tuesday next week. So kind of all over the place this week. But let's get to our question. How about that? Yeah. OK, this came from Alfred from

Canada. It didn't specify where, just Canada. So Canada at large, I'm about to issue an RFP for an IAM system. What are some tips or tricks to make sure it goes smoothly? I love and hate this question. Let me start. First, I'll say I like it because I think this is an opportunity to maybe help people out there figure out how to do a good RFP, especially from the customer side. And I've been on the customer side, so I kind of know how it works.

Now I'm on typically the respondent side, right, the vendor side, whether it's implementation or advisory services or whatever it may be. And so on that side, I am really not a fan of RFPs because I feel like they are a lot of work for very minimal value. Because here's the secret. Every RFP answer you're going to get is going to say yes in some way, shape or form. Of course it can do that.

And so I feel like it's, I think it's a little bit of an art to make sure that one you've got appropriately faced questions, but that you don't get lost in, I don't know in Ministrata when it comes to RFP. So that's my initial thoughts when I hear RFP for IM system. What do you think? Yeah, yeah, my, I think those are great points. I think my initial thought is, you know, what seat do you have

in the organization? I think if you're the person who's like the I am practitioner of your organization, you have to ask the question, how objective or subjective do I want this to be? You want it to be a very much an objective exercise where it's like rate certain points and certain requirements and things like that. It doesn't give you a whole lot of leeway to, you know, direct your decision toward a vendor that you're really impressed by.

Or maybe you've gone to the conferences and you really think that one system or one generator is going to give you a better end product than another. Or I'm not going to get change order to death and things like that. So I, I think that's a, a big key actually put the change order piece aside because I think it's totally separate exercise. But you know, me personally, I like to allow for more subjectivity when it comes to an

RFPI. Think this price aspect is a very big one because I've seen some RFPs where it's like submit the price and there's not much specificity in terms of how much the price influences the decision or it's set to a a smaller percentage. I've seen it where it's been a very high percentage of how an RFP response gets created. And when it's a very high percentage, everyone's motivated to give you a better price. Sounds great, right?

But I think most respondents, whether they're consultants or software firms, you know, they're not going to like give away their services or give away their software, right? They're they're going to try to wizzle down enough to to extend a a very good price. So I think that there's a danger in putting too much weight in the price, especially early on.

So I think you have to ask yourself too is what is what is it you're looking to get out of this RFP because you know, tips or tricks to make this run smoothly? Like why are you doing it? Do you are you doing it because you have to do it right? Is it some sort of like internal organizational government step that because this is expected to be X number of dollars, you must submit to RFP and have X number of minimum, you know, responses, right?

That sort of thing. You know, government definitely does it like this pretty much all the time. But I think you need to understand like, what is the end goal? Like what are you hoping to get out of this RFP? Is it find a solution? Is it determine pricing? Is it you don't know what you're looking for and you're hoping that somebody out there has a solution that kind of meets the needs that you've put onto a

piece of paper. So I think the first thing is make sure you know what you want to get out of the RFP, because then you can start to figure out what are the questions you want to ask? What's the questions you don't want to ask? You don't care about, right? Don't waste time for things that aren't relevant to your output, or at least your your intended outcome anyway.

Yeah, You know, I, I also think that if you're very early in the process and you have the time to do it, you can start with an RO 5 request for information and then come to some kind of come forward and start to understand your requirements a little bit better, tell you about their software and our services and you can start to get a feel for the landscape.

Now, I think if you're a company that does not have to go through a formal RFP process and RFI might be preferable where you go out and you use it as a tool to gather information. The RFP then gives you kind of a structured process for selecting a final and a final bidder, if you will.

And that's the pair where I usually see the hang up where it's like, you know, if you're not setting up your RFP in a in a strategic way and getting pricing set in, in central or using pricing in such a way that it doesn't become on something where it's like, OK, we're going to kind of narrowly meet your requirements, but very narrowly just so we can get the lowest price so that we make the finalist list. I think you bring a good point there, like not everything has

to be an RFP. Maybe you are more interested in an RFI because you do want that information or an RFQ request for quote. You just want pricing information based on certain information. You know, if I think there are options here, but I think the first question to ask yourself is what do you want to get out of this and make sure you tailor the RFX. You know, I QP, whatever are the letters there are to make sure that you're using the appropriate vehicle to get that

information. So, OK, so now we've kind of figured out, OK, what are we trying to get out of? It what are? You know, for an IM system, there's probably some technical requirements, but it's probably more focused on business requirements is what I'm thinking. Or functional requirements. Meaning I'm looking for a system that can do this right. I want to onboard an identity from, I don't know, work day into my Active Directory or into my SAP or, you know, name

whatever applications is that. Does that ring a bell or does that resonate with you all? Because they feel like most RPS are really kind of focused on sort of the requirements aspect of things. Right. They're definitely, it definitely seems like requirements of the driver and kind of the waiting for most R PS I think a good process for gathering, documenting these requirements is, you know, the the activity of going through

developing a strategy. So if you have a strategy and say for I am, we're talking about a single sign on system, it could be a customer sign on system, it could be an employee, it could be your IGA system or privilege access management, or maybe you're getting into identity proofing. But it's some area. You have to actually understand the area before you can put together a good set of requirements. And so I think that's where maybe that RFI really can help because you don't know what's

out there. You don't know what are the standard set of requirements. Obviously if you start putting the other requirements like the system must be able to levitate above the ground like no system showing to meet that, so you have to have. But it's in the cloud. It levitates. Automatically, yes, potentially you could get lucky. And I think what you want to do though is like understand how what's out there in the market

now. Now, I'm not saying you should build your requirements to steer your RFP one way or the other, but you have to actually know, like say you're interested in ITDR, like what are the use cases that are solved by ITDR? And I think when you go and you research ITDR, you're going to find that the set of use cases that different vendors provide

can be quite different. I think when you look at access management for customer identity and access management, you're going to find that most of these cases are very similar. Similar but different because there's always some weird wrinkle that's like, OK, well, we want a customer identity and access measure platform that does everything ACIM platform does. And we also want to do this

other really weird custom thing. It could definitely be the custom thing or it could even be just like what the approach is, you know? I remember with customer identity and access management, Austa used to go up gives Alt 0. Now they're in the same company. But Optus focus was a a tool focus for I think like the engineering community, you get into the system and configure it using the UI. Alt Zero was very much focused on the developer community.

So we give you a lot of code samples and ways to integrate it with the using AP is. And so you see those two systems, basic functionality was very similar, but the approach to integrating and operating those tools is very different and you may have a comfort level with one over the other.

Yeah, that's true. I think that's again probably one of the good requirements is, you know, do you need things like AP is and other sort of dev friendly tools or are you looking for something that is configurable right out-of-the-box theoretically and try to stay within that? You know, sometimes with RFPs, you find that it's just like a grab bag of every requirement out there.

And I think that's a a very immature way to approach it because, you know, having every feature, like if you went and you bought your Tesla and you got every feature engines on every feature that was available to it, but you didn't even know that you had those features or how to access them and you didn't have any reason to use them. What good would they do? You just be spending money for something that you didn't need. And I think that.

And sometimes you're a practitioner secretary, I don't know all of what I need, so I'm going to ask for everything. And I think that that ought to trigger the thought that, well, maybe I need to put more thought of research into this rather than just keep things. And I know we're all dealing with deadlines and things like that. But you I guess the the end summary from my perspective is that you really need to know what you're asking for.

Yeah, that's a really good point, because if you don't know what you're asking for, you're going to get blinded or distracted by something shiny or something that is really not, you know, something that you even care about from a from a capability standpoint. I think like I, I've been on this soapbox about AI for the last couple years and I'm I'm on record, right? I love AI, think it's awesome. But there's a lot of companies that get distracted like, oh, we

can do AI this and that. They're still like haven't gotten the basics down. You really can't do some things until you do the basics well. And this is an area where you want to be very careful you don't get distracted, especially for an area or a subject matter that you're not really an expert. If you haven't taken the time to build up expertise, I would say go find someone who is to help

you with that. Because I said at the very beginning, every vendor is going to say yes, we can do that and then twist the answer. So it makes it makes it sound like they're yes meets meets your need. And so you want to really be able to understand the nuances between OK, does that make sense? Or did they, you know, did it twist it around into a convoluted answer, right or, or something on those lines.

So I would definitely recommend at least know something about your subject. If you don't know about it, go find someone who does, right, whether it's some internal or read a book or watch a video or hire a consultant, right, that knows that kind of area. I think that would pay off in the long run. Yeah. You know, I as you've been having this conversation, I've also thought about the positive aspect in RFP.

So I generally don't like RFPs. I kind of tend towards what you said earlier, but I just put on the cap of trying to be positive. You know, one thing that we've seen over time is that people want to take the top leaders in the Magic Quadrant and picking on the Magic Quadrant because so many people rely on it. But they say that that the space

is just the, the leaders. I think by putting an RFP out, you may get a response that surprises you from a vendor that maybe you're not familiar with or maybe a service provider that you haven't done business with in the past comes along and just like, wow, they actually pack their stuff together and they have a solution that's a better fit and they understand my industry better than maybe the incumbents or the leaders in the

space. And I think one thing that I'm not saying it's the case now, but I think it's traditionally happened over time in this space is that sometimes the the leaders, they get, I don't know if lazy's the right word, that sounds very negative, but they get so big that they don't innovate as fast any of these up and comers that are innovating

like crazy. And I mean, you've seen it with some of our sponsors spotlight episodes where some of these up and coming vendors are coming out with features that nobody else has. And I'm thinking of, you know, little security with that feature around, you know, you can kind of like point and click on a cloud application to kind of train its AI on how to than an excess certification. It's like that's innovative, man. I haven't seen that anywhere else.

So I think, you know, looking down market sometimes can be a

a, you can be forced to do that by RFPs. But I also think if you make your RFPs so difficult to respond to, it's going to turn those, those vendors off for even trying. Yeah, I please if you're if you're putting an RFP out there, make it reasonable. And there's people who spend a lot of time on these, I feel like I do one to two of these per month it seems like and a lot of them ask similar same questions. So that's, you know, kind of whatever.

But that idea that you mentioned about down market I think is a really interesting one because there are a lot of good products that are not yet Gartner Magic Quadrant, right. They just started out, of course, they're not up in the upper right yet because they don't have any market share, they don't have customers, you know, etcetera. So there's some really good products there. They're also hungry for customers.

So you may get better pricing or better terms on a contract or maybe even influence the direction of the product to, you know, to some degree. So it's definitely worth, you know, really kind of shaking the bushes a little bit and seeing what's out there before you just say, OK, well, we know it's going to be, you know, this solution or this is the type of IM system we're looking for and we know about the big two or big

three in the industry. We'll just send it to them and you know, you end up with just those. And that's how it kind of self feeds stuff, right? They keep getting bigger and bigger and it's becomes harder for the smaller, more innovative companies to do it on their own. And then eventually they get bought out by somebody and become part of the Borg as a bigger company. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, another thing I would

recommend doing in like some, like the biggest thing, the obvious is combining software and services into a single RFP. And the reason I think to do that is it's a time saver. I don't think you'd want to go out and select technology and then say, oh, how are we going to implement this now and have to go either get any other RFP or I mean, if you're, if you have to do RFPs, I guess that's what you would do.

And or if your plan is to just go to software vendors resources, I don't generally find that that's the optimal way to go about implementing, you know, commercial self or software as a service products. Yeah, there's very few software vendors that really want to stick around for a, you know, long term implementation. They might help you out with like, you know, a first phase or kind of getting up and running, but that's not their business model.

They don't really want to be in that mode of, OK, we know we're deploying an IM system, it's going to be a three-year program and we're expecting to introduce a bunch of different capabilities. Generally speaking, you know, the software vendors are not in that. That's where partners come in, implementation partners, etcetera. And that's where you definitely

want to make sure that you know you've got the right implementation partner because they feel like that's one of the most important decisions you can make is you can have the best product in the world, but if you have a terrible integration partner, you're going to have a bad experience with that. That's then that's it. You can also have a product that is considered maybe not as capable.

And if you have a really good partner that really understands the tool and is, you know, innovative in the way they use it, you can have a great experience better than if you had bought the quote leader right in the space. So there's a lot of calculus that kind of comes into this. Absolutely, yeah. And I, you know, I think this whole model of like one throat to shake. I think that there's just as many tiers that get associated with that idea as there are with we have so many vendors and

things like that. I, I think you made a point earlier about smaller vendors sometimes going in exceeding expectations to, it's not just smaller vendors, but just sometimes it's vendors who you know, get an opportunity to and associate their name with, with yours. It doesn't have to be a small company, but just somebody who's like hungry for your business rather than just handing the business over to the biggest, biggest name on the block.

Yeah. I mean, I think it's it's there's there's options out there. I guess it's probably the best way to. Put Yeah. The other thing that I find

interesting sometimes in these conversations is, and this tends to come out more in the implementation side is what is your experience, you know, deploying this product or performing this service, whatever. And I find a lot of companies struggle at least on the, on the on the on the responder side around way. OK, well, you know, collectively like, you know, Jim, you and I have 40 years, 405050 years of experience doing IAM work.

That experience doesn't go away when you and I change companies, right? We've been through Identity Protiviti and now we're with RSM, and each of those companies gained the benefit of our collective years of experience. So even if you have a company that maybe is a newer maybe identity for whatever it may be, don't discount the personal histories of the people who will be involved with the project. And the people involved with the project should absolutely be

part of the response. You want to know who's there, you know, are they going to be assigned? And you never know. A lot of companies will not name resources because it's very difficult from the company's perspective to say, well, we don't know if Jeff and Jim are going to be here next year. They might win the lottery or the podcast takes off and they get a Netflix special, right, or something like that. Here's here's hoping, right?

Not going to win, but you definitely want to have a sense of what are the people that are going to be involved with your project? Are they experienced? Don't discount personal experience is just what I'm saying as part of that. That equation that applies to vendors as well, because you could have a lot of really smart people who maybe they did a start up and they're just getting out the gates. But they spent, you know, 50 years building Watson at IBM and they know AI inside it out,

right? That experience didn't just go away because they changed companies. Right. And I think that if you're not an RFP scenario, you can easily judge that for yourself. If you if you are putting on an RFP, don't, don't make it so objective and so tightly worded that you miss out on those kind of things. I think that's the real key is like, don't make your RFP so difficult to respond to that you don't really get the right information.

I think just respond to Jim, but also free to make a selection. I think what you said there is like T like don't make an RFP that doesn't allow you to select the vendor you like because of some scoring criteria that says they're not the best, right? Or whatever it may be. Yeah, exactly. So one last note that I had was the other thing is don't ask for

a response. That's going to get you 100 page response and you're going to get 15 responses and now your selection team has to review 1500 pages of documents. So, in other words, don't ask for more than you care to review. Scope it. Don't ask questions you don't care about. Ask the questions you do care about. Ask For more information if you need it. You know, I think if, if a company is taking time to respond to this, chances are that of course they want your

business, right? And they want, they need information to try and put together the best response as possible. So, you know, if you're able to take the time to answer questions, you know, a lot of companies might have like, OK, we're going to open up our bridge and we'll do a question and answer censor, you know, session now. And people can answer questions, right? Or ask questions or maybe.

But yeah, I mean, you know, I, I don't want to say be easy with it, but only ask the stuff you care about and try to try to look for reasons to say, why are we ask this question? Is this mandatory or is this a nice to have? Or is this just plain not not relevant at all and let's cut it? Right, right. And then try to design your questions that they're all not all yes or no questions where you have very objective criteria on, you know, whoever we get the most yeses from, they're going

to win the business. Whoever gives us the lowest price, they're going to get the business. Give people ask open-ended questions like we do on this podcast. You're you're going to probably learn a lot more and you'll see if people actually give thought to your questions or if they just when you see the RFP response database and pulled a bunch of stuff out and pasted it in it, that's where you get back.

I mean, you did not get the A-Team from that, from that respondent and look to the one where people put time into responding. They need, they need or really care about getting that business and then you'll get a better product from now, I bet. And just like every other industry, AI is impacting the RFP business just like anyone else, you know, it's making it easier to write responses and to have question banks of, you know, answers that you've previously used and things like that.

So I the idea of an open-ended question is very is very good to make sure that you're not just getting a canned response. Some things will be can't you know, when was your company formed? How long have you been in business? Like that story doesn't change. Think about the questions that really that you want to get more of a, you know, less canned responses from and ask them in a way that it is open-ended that they can't use. OK, well, we use this answer for this one.

Let's copy paste it from there and put it here. Good enough. All right, good luck. Agreed. Agreed. Yeah, great question on the candidate. Yeah, yeah. Thanks, Alfred. We spent 20 minutes talking about RFPs, which is generally 20 minutes more than I ever want to talk about RFPs. So, so Jeff, I do have a question for you about an

upcoming trip for your before we do that, I wanted to mention an update on my dad or actually it's a it's a really weird thing that happened yesterday. Say wake up to the text message from KD that my dad is on the way to the hospital and I left you a voicemail. So I look check my voicemail. So a female's voice saying, you know, this is Katie, your dad's on the way to the hospital. I wasn't able, you know, to get you or whatever after he get out.

So I call my dad and he's fine. And then I, I text this person back. I'm like, I just talked to my dad and he's not I'm sorry I texted you in person. So I didn't know if it was like some kind of scam, but it was kind of nice because the heck my dad for like 1/2 hour, they gave me an update and we talked a lot about cybersecurity and how he doesn't answer the phone and as he knows the number and stuff like that say he's coming along. By the way, I figured I'd give

you that update. I don't think he's using a flip phone anymore. And and I guess thank you to Katie for getting me to call my dad, but also and I think through the your heart is there. A spoiled word. It was actually your dad pretending to be Katie on a different account. He's gone beyond He's way more advanced than he's letting on. Yeah, Yeah. He's using AI, he's Simpson kind of bot to make sure that I call him on a periodic basis. That's nefarious.

That could be nefarious, but that's interesting. Well, I'm glad to hear your dad's good. Yeah, yeah. So what are you, what are you up to? You're going on a a surprise 50th birthday and party. And I'm wondering, what do you think of surprise parties? You know, I don't, I don't think I've ever been a part of one before. So this is kind of my first time. Yeah, it is a surprise birthday party. A bunch of us are flying into Dallas from kind of parts

unknown. This is somebody that I've known for three, almost 30 years, 25 years, met at Chili's in Bolingbrook way a long time ago. And we're a crew that has been very close kind of since them. And so it'd be good to, you know, see folks that kind of came out of that cell. You know, my friend Jeff, Jason, Chad, we're all getting together. My wife is coming with me. So we actually found someone to come and watch our dogs.

My brother's actually going to fly in, watch the dogs for us for the weekend, enjoy Asheville and the Tesla, while my wife and I are in Dallas with our friends kind of hanging out for this surprise birthday party. It is being coordinated by his wife, which is I find very cool. And so it's basically like we're meeting at a hotel to get on a party bus and then drive to their house and sort of surprise him at their house. And then we're doing some sort of like escape room thing, I

think afterwards. So by the time this show goes live, that event will have occurred. So very much looking forward to it. It's been a long time since we've kind of gotten the crew back together. So I don't know what to expect other than I'm sure he's going to be shocked if the if surprise holds true because the number of people coming in is like 20 or

25, His parents. And we're flying in from all over the place, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Illinois, and they're in Dallas now. And so, you know, people taking the time to come out and and do this I think is very cool. That's really awesome. So did your wife work at? Is she a chili head too? No, she did not. We met at a different restaurant because that's how I roll, moving around restaurants when I

was younger. No, she was not with Chili's, but the Chili's crew was sort of like my college years. And so, you know, we live together in a house, you know, my friends, Jeff and Jason and Chad, we were basically inseparable for many years. And of course, we got older and, you know, families and stuff like that. So it's been a little bit tougher to stay in touch, but very much kind of the crew getting back together.

And every time, you know, it might be, you know, it could be five years, 2 years, a year, 30 seconds since I last talked to one of them. And it's like, you know, it's what it's like that friendship group that's like you just pick up right where you left off. Nothing has changed. Everyone still has the same personalities and kind of getting together. It's like no time has passed when we get into a room together. That sounds so cool, man. I had a great, great trip.

Yeah. I'm looking forward to it. It's been a while since I had a vacation or like a real vacation. So it'll be, you know, a day or so, but we'll. Take a while to go on a real vacation and you go to Dallas. Well, last year it's not. The vacation capital of the world. Well, this is a busy month, so I have that and then let's see the

weekend. So I get back from that on like a Tuesday, couple days of working, and then I fly to South Bend, I think it is to go to Michigan for my brother's bachelor party kind of weekend. So that's another weekend after that. We'll be like figuring that out. And then I think I go to New York City the week after that. And then the actual wedding for my brother is in Chicago at the end of the month. It's like every weekend this

month I'm basically like busy. Get ready, you'll be watching all the episodes of Identity Center seem to be just me and our guest. Don't worry, I wouldn't put you through just me. It's going to be me and the guest that we're we're going to be missing out on Jeff for a few episodes this month. We tried. That's why I said like it's, it's been a lot of hassle trying to coordinate schedules and stuff like that for this month.

So yeah, there will probably be a couple of episodes here where I'm not able to make it, but I will be editing them so I can make Jim say whatever I want to say to the power of cross production. As you had done before. All right, why don't we go ahead and wrap it up there?

Anything else? YouTube. Go YouTube. Idacpodcast.tv will take you straight to our YouTube channel. Hit that, like and subscribe button. We're trying to grow the channel and yeah, put a lot of effort into that. See on the web, IDC podcast.com, Twitter X, whatever it's called at IDC podcasts and yeah, LinkedIn. Feel free to reach out to us, connect, send us ideas, send us feedback on our website. You know, something's broken. Let me know future episodes. What's that?

Be like, be like Alfred. Send us questions for future episodes. Yeah, yeah. Send us, you know, whatever maybe you know, whether it's I am or not, We'll we'll try to find a time to answer it. All right, let's go leave it there. Thanks everybody for watching and or listening and we'll talk with you all in the next one. You've been listening to Identity at the Center. We hope you've enjoyed the show. Make sure to like, rate and review, and we'll be back soon.

But in the meantime, hit the website at identity@thecenter.com. See you next time on Identity at the Center.