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Drex DeFord: Hey everyone. Welcome to the show. I'm lucky today to have Timothy Boettcher from AvePoint with me. Welcome to the program Timothy.

Timothy Boettcher: Thank you for having me.

Drex DeFord: I'm excited that you're here.

We got off to a little bit of a false start, and this is all fun and games that happen sometimes when we're putting a show together. You have a really interesting background. You're Australian. Love your accent. Thank you. Everyone, I'm sure loves your accent. But you're from Australia and you have this really interesting path

from Australia to where you are now. Tell me a little bit about yourself and your background.

Timothy Boettcher: Awesome. Thanks, Drex and yes, you're right. The accent helps me get away with a lot of I can deliver a lot of medicine with a spoonful of sugar, right? Like,

Thank you.

Timothy Boettcher: my background's in information management and knowledge management. And to add a bit more color to that, I started my career about 20 years ago with a large web hosting provider in Australia that was doing websites that were the Australian equivalent of like msn.com or ticketmaster.com, those kinds of websites, technical role.

But that gave me my footing in internet technology, which led to intranets. And then I spent just under a decade specializing in SharePoint Business Consulting, which gave me a lot of exposure to knowledge management, governance, compliance highly regulated industries. SharePoint is very versatile technology, so it cuts across things like

obviously a big presence in healthcare and health systems, but also financial education, public sector and commercial organizations as well. Used to work with a lot of different vendors and consulting for things like compliance and automation and regulation and I ended up, one of 'em was AvePoint and I ended up working with them in their Singapore office.

I'm reciting just outside of DC now in Northern Virginia. And over those years of transitioning from technical to consulting to sort of pre-sales and sales I eventually found myself working very closely with marketing. And so since I work with sort of the product and the marketing teams and the sales teams and the implementation teams, so I sort of have that cross-functional role, which has led to the go to market strategy lead. So, that's kind of how I ended up where I'm today.

Drex DeFord: I, yeah, I love it. I mean, I think some of the best salespeople that I've ever met actually started off as consultants because you ask, your questions are always sort of probing and trying to find the problem.

Timothy Boettcher: Amazing question. And I know that your audience is very broad. You've got a big wide spectrum of listeners. So you know, when we're talking tech in healthcare for a lot of people, I think it immediately goes to the EHRs, right? Another core side of clinical systems, which as it should, That's a critical part.

Of IT and healthcare. But if you're specifically, you know, the problem that we solve for, there's another layer, which traditionally I think was a little bit seen as administrative or operational back office, but now it's really come to the forefront with ai and that's that collaborative platforms like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, even turn back the clock a few years, the humble file shares and SharePoint on-prem.

But there is a massive volume of unstructured fluid collaborative data that are living in inboxes, living in teams chats, living in SharePoint, living in Google Drive. And this is critical stuff, right? Like we've got policy updates, care coordination notes, training, documentation. Traditionally this was viewed as operational, but what we've seen with AI now, there's a push that sees this data as strategic there were some forward thinking organizations that could see the knowledge management and see the value, I think in health because of the EHR discussions, that air was sucked outta the room,

Drex DeFord: uhhuh.

Timothy Boettcher: But now this is shining a big spotlight on it and

A huge challenge to do that at scale across these large fluid volume sets. And that's exactly where AvePoint steps in. So we have the cloud platform that secures, governs, automates, and protects all of that collaborative data.

Drex DeFord: Okay. And so now I have to ask the, like, tell me more. I mean, with a lot of things you can almost say it sounds too good to be true, but I know we have this chronic problem in healthcare.

We do have a lot of data in a lot of places, and it's not well organized, and often we don't know that we even have it. And the other problem is, from the security perspective, the other problem is too many people can get their hands on stuff they shouldn't actually be able to get their hands on. Tell me more about how you work with customers to resolve that.

Where is that data coming from and what is it accessing? Obviously there's some restrictions and things we can do with APIs and other kinds of checks, but there's also a lot of organizational data that is now getting exposed and tapped into, which may be, traditionally the governance wasn't as tight.

So like I said, we have a cloud platform that connects to your Microsoft 3 6 5, Google, Salesforce, and it helps you go through some processes of things like data discovery, data cleanup and data cleanup doesn't mean just like deleting or archiving.

There's a full governance retention lifecycle records compliance conversation that goes around that. So understanding, sensitivity and retention and then,

Drex DeFord: oh, the privacy people gotta be loving you. Yeah. And probably the general counsel too.

The magic comes in on the unstructured data, and that's what we're able to bring in.

Drex DeFord: On the unstructured data. Are you looking for particular patterns of words are you looking for? I mean, how do you go about, because a lot of our data's unstructured from notes in the EHR to the stuff that you're talking about in email.

How do you look at that?

Timothy Boettcher: There's sort of two ways to do it. So the bottom up approach is more like looking for, like you said, individual words or patterns, things like, PHI, PII, other kinds of sensitive, protected data that may be at a file level we wanna find, tag, categorize, and then have some sort of operational action that happens over the top.

What's unique about these collaborative systems, like M365 or Google Workspace is we can actually also take a kind of I don't wanna say top down approach, but there's also a workspace level approach you can take too, which is very unique to these systems. You don't have to go through and look through 30 million documents for everything.

And that can then filter down as well. So you've kind of got this two layered approach, which depending on your initiatives in terms of speed or control or visibility, you can attack it from all angles.

Drex DeFord: Is there an agent that goes on, like for every user on every machine?

How does it work? I. Yeah, that's right because you, I probably should ask that question too. What was that CIO in recovery? Was that what I saw in that? Yeah. Recovering CIO. So I've been a CIO most of my career, and then I was an independent consultant for a number of years, and then I worked for CrowdStrike for three years.

Timothy Boettcher: concept. Yeah. It's a cloud platform. It's hosted in Azure, uhhuh um, to talk shop. It's, GCG, GCG high, were IL5, all that kind of stuff.

FedRAMPed.

Drex DeFord: Yeah. IL5.

Timothy Boettcher: Great.

Drex DeFord: Holy cow. Really? So you're doing Abu are you doing a bunch of work with the government? Oh yeah. This is really good stuff to think about. I probably don't even need to tell you this, but as you talk to healthcare systems, like having that conversation about IL5 and it means this and so we do

work with classified systems in the government makes CISOs feel way more comfortable with like, okay, these guys are cool. You know, let's go ahead and So

Timothy Boettcher: yeah, you're, you're right.

We have one that's purely security focused that will like a DSPM right, will surface all your overshared information. But we also have other tools that resolve that and put policies in place that say, okay, well Drex is in this site and he's an owner of this site, so he has full permission to do whatever he wants.

That's fine. But now Drex is trying to add an external user in, but we know he shouldn't be doing that in this kind of site. So we're gonna stop that from happening. So even though you technically have the permissions, this will come in and override it and say, no, don't do that. And then let someone know that you've done that.

Drex DeFord: Interesting too. So when you're talking to somebody of a particular age and you're talking about SharePoint and your experience with SharePoint, like all these things that you're talking about. Were all the things that drove everybody completely crazy about SharePoint.

Timothy Boettcher: Yep. All

Drex DeFord: that kind of stuff. So, I mean, so, and that's interesting. Your background has kind of led you into this path.

Timothy Boettcher: When we say that often people jump to that the health records and the medical records, like kind of the epics and the Cerners and we have to sort of back that conversation out and say no. That's not the space that we play. We play in this space over here. And I think it's been getting more and more spotlight now because of what AI is doing.

So that's why this is a super critical conversation.

Drex DeFord: Stuff around SharePoint too. I mean, not just SharePoint, but now we are where we are today. It rings true though back in the day parts of the organization who couldn't get money to buy apps would basically build apps and SharePoint and become.

that business or clinical team is completely dependent on that thing, and it wasn't something that was sanctioned, it just kind of happened.

Timothy Boettcher: exactly what you said. I'm getting flashbacks to like, InfoPath and all that kind of stuff back in the day. You think about that with power platform today, there was still a little bit of a barrier to entry.

Now there's almost no barrier to entry. Anyone can just talk to copilot now and say, oh, I wanna do this. Or they had something called, I don't know. Did you see copilot actions? I had not. I think they just renamed it to something else now. But essentially it's a template now, and you can just fill in the blanks and it says, all right, I'm a project manager and I wanna message these five people once a week before Friday and send a follow up .

So if we were worried about InfoPath and power apps before, it's about to get a whole lot more

Drex DeFord: vibe. Coding is definitely a thing, right? People are just making it up on the fly. They're not technically capable of understanding the unintended consequences of this thing that they're building too, which is also concerning.

You help them manage that too? Yeah.

Timothy Boettcher: Yeah. So that's why knowing what is it trying to do? What data is it accessing? Is it supposed to be writing to this data? Yes, a hundred percent. A hundred percent. That's the space that we play.

Drex DeFord: We have this webinar that's coming up and we'll put a note in the comments where , you can go and register and hear the rest of the story.

When you go out and visit with customers, 'cause I know you're out all the time talking to health systems. When you sit down with them, what is the conversation that you're usually hoping to have? What are some of the questions that you ask? As a consultant,

Timothy Boettcher: yeah,

Timothy Boettcher: First of all, we wanna understand how are they leveraging the different content repositories for their AI initiatives today. So what are the goal of their AI initiatives. So I'm a Microsoft Co-pilot, MVP. So there's great things you can do with co-pilot, like take policy and procedure documents and instantly click and turn them into FAQs for training with your team or, being able to interact and ask questions with policy documents.

Am I allowed to be doing this? And it will question the policy document and let you know there's really some really great applications for understanding, okay. Which of those are touching your unstructured data? And how comfortable do you feel about this? Are you having any roadblocks to your gen AI rollouts?

Again, to quote Gartner, they're saying still the number one obstacle to AI implementations is weak information governance. So there's different areas where governance can fall down. Most, organizations are at some different level of maturity on that journey. Some high, some low, some in different areas.

And if not, what's holding you back and trying to understand what's lacking so we can help fill the missing piece.

Drex DeFord: When you talk to folks in the field do you find people that feel like they're just sort of frozen? Yeah. Like, there's so many decisions to make.

Governance seems so overwhelming. We've never done it here, or we've only done a little bit of it here and is super complicated and I don't have an army of people to do that. Do you find people who are just I don't know what to, I don't even know where to go. Do you help with that?

Timothy Boettcher: Absolutely. And that's why we're still having this conversation today. Because the, the frameworks and best practices of how you inventory, classify manage and then operationalize or automate your governance strategy. The approach to that, the best practices have been the same for the last 20 years.

Like, hey, if we want to take advantage of this new technology and not fall behind from our peers and make sure we're doing it safely and responsibly we have to get our house in order now.

So I. yeah, absolutely. We see that

Drex DeFord: How big of a deal is change in this whole conversation, because for a lot of places, this AI discussion is still a little scary.

I'm not sure exactly what we're gonna do with it. Like you said, there's a lot of places that they're just blocking sites and the problem is that it, on Wednesday when you open up that software as a service app, there's a new button that didn't exist and nobody knew about it, and suddenly there's AI built into that application.

So change is a tough part of this. Are you guys involved in the whole change management process?

So, one of the big areas as well, I don't know where to get started on my data. Where is my data? Where is the stuff that's getting used a lot? Getting that visibility, number one, will not only show you where you need to focus and prioritize your efforts, but also help you tackle the change management question about, okay, who are gonna be our

early adopters who are gonna be our champions. In fact, we can pull up a dashboard of who's most likely to convert, like who's most likely to be an early adopter based on the usage patterns of other M365 software

Drex DeFord: uhhuh, right?

Timothy Boettcher: If you've got someone that just lives in their inbox all day, maybe they're not ready to move.

But if you've got someone who's cross section of Inbox and teams and is using some of the early adoption features, that might be a good candidate. Yeah. You

Drex DeFord: found yourself a citizen data scientist who might want to go first, right? That's cool.

So talking about the change management, it's not just on IT's shoulders to understand what all the data is and what's sensitive and what's not. You need to bring your business users , all of your staff into this discussion as well. And that's again, something that we help with.

But it does require that change management to make people understand why it's important, why they do need to be tagging things, and ideally you wanna get out the user's way as much as possible. You wanna make it as easy for them to do the right thing. But sometimes that does need a little bit of change.

It

Drex DeFord: Really gives, managers and directors and vice presidents more of a superpower, right? They've got access to all of this data. They're able to do the kind of amazing things that you wanna do with this data. And sometimes until you start to do that kind of work, you don't actually realize the kinds of questions you can ask, yes, to make your job easier or to make care safer for patients and families.

You have to ask the right questions and have to want to do it, and have to get familiar with it. So in terms of the adoption of the AI application itself, , there is a change uplift there. And the way to tackle that is understanding your audience and what and how data they're using and giving them key use cases and examples as well as, local champions they can look to for advice.

Drex DeFord: Users teaching other users how to get better with the data's always been a big part of this too.

Timothy Boettcher: Arms length support, you know?

Drex DeFord: right. Become the consultant and let them help each other. That's a great strategy. Hey, I really appreciate the time today. I've learned a lot. I can't wait for the webinar.

Timothy Boettcher: Thank you for having me. I really love this chat. It was fantastic.

Drex DeFord: Thanks.

If you found this conversation valuable, don't miss the upcoming webinar on June 12th where Tim and I and a couple of other folks will dive deeper into responsible AI implementation in healthcare.

We'll explore data governance strategies that balance innovation with security and compliance. Wanna learn more about this and other cutting edge healthcare IT topics? Head over to this week, health.com and watch for the popup to register.​