#41 Better processes and getting stuff done with a new generation of apps with Jigx

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Process and Automation Podcast with the Automation Guys. Usually you hear Arno and myself talking about all things process and automation, and that's, uh, all great in general, but as we also ask our listeners what they like, and they have been so kind recently sending us plenty of feedback. And our listeners like interview episodes a lot. And so here's another one, another interview episode with two very interesting guests who share the same passion for process and automation as we do. And with that, it was a great pleasure to welcome our guest Adrian van Wyk and Dennis Parker from Jyx to the podcast. Hello both, thank you for joining us today.

Yeah, thank you for having us, we appreciate it. It's good to be here.

Great, yeah, thank you for your time. And yeah, as a start, please tell us a bit more about what you both are doing and what you're responsible for at Jyx.

So I'm one of the founders and CEO We started Jyx January 1st, 2020, so before the pandemic hit, and we've been working pretty much on architecture and technology and building the software up through that. We reached out to some of the best people we've worked with in the industry in the past, and one of the guys that was very instrumental to help us build the previous company is Dennis. So I called Dennis and asked him if he didn't want to help us start this business. And Dennis, I'll let you do sort of your introductions and what you're busy with. But yeah, so we've been working the last year and a half to build this company, which we'll talk about.

Yeah, yeah, thanks very much. Yeah, so from my perspective, I'm pretty much as Adrian said. I mean, we've got some, some, some history together with a lot of focus obviously on the promotion automation, on the process automation space. And, you know, I think as we'll talk about during this interview, what we're doing now, I think really it's the core of our passions. It's sort of, it is automation because you're helping customers do things in digital way much more efficiently. And we'll talk about that. But it's also exciting and it's fun because there's development at the root of this as well. And again, we'll talk about that. But I think bottom line, I think there's an amazing opportunity, and it's an amazing opportunity to follow a passion and do something really interesting. And I'm looking forward to talking about that a little bit more as we go through the session today.

Okay, sounds really good. So the journey you had together before was with K2, right?

Yeah, absolutely. So that could take a whole podcast on its own.

Yeah, we can do that at some point.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we survived Black Pearl together, which, like Dennis said, that is a podcast on its own. But it was definitely— we used all the good things, all the mistakes we made, and I think collectively we have enough between the two of us.

Fantastic. Yeah, and everything flows now into Jyx. Really exciting to hear more about that. So yeah, between Arno and myself, we are working with probably like 15+ vendors to support companies with all things process and automation. And where do you see the sweet spot for Jyx in the market?

So it's a great question. We, as we mentioned, we both come from an automation background, and we lived that for 17 years. We saw the world evolve. I mean, it's actually amazing. We started this before XML was even used in the market and.NET even existed. So it's been an exceptional journey, and throughout that journey, we definitely learned a lot, and we we see technology evolve, and we see sort of not just technology, but how people work and how they collaborate and how they get things done evolve over 17 years. And, you know, during that journey, you see opportunities, you see things that you think you can improve on, but you don't always have time. That's probably not core to what you were doing. And JIX was sort of born out of one of those ideas where if you look at automation today and you look at how people work, I mean, there's, there's a lot that shows that if we can break things down into smaller pieces and get those pieces done very quickly, and people not just become more productive, but they actually feel more productive as well. So rather than sitting you down and, and, and, and letting people work on a task for an extensive period of time, if we can understand how to move that task between people that are the best at what they do, or even if it's the same person, break it up into very short periods of time. Now, it's interesting because one of the technical innovations that sort of brought this psychological pattern to the front is mobile devices, where your engagement with the mobile devices are very short, very focused, and drive a very specific outcome very quickly. And it was sort of— the interfaces into mobile devices was hard. So the people that started building software, and especially when Apple started driving the revolution, Android then followed, we ended up with these two very powerful platforms. People had started building solutions for those platforms, were sort of forced into making sure that they built their applications in a way that engagements are very short but very productive. Now, that worked incredibly well for social and media and collaboration applications. And the one area that never really followed that was applications that people use for work, whether it's internal within the organization or business to business, business to consumer. Um, it's actually very rare to see companies build some of these highly effective applications, um, for use within and lift the productivity of their own staff. And almost every single employee is walking around with a super computer in their pockets these days. Um, and, um, so we looked at that whole space. We looked at the fact that, um, the majority of workers today, and where we actually see growth in labor markets, are people that don't sit in front of desks or in front of computers. And we said, somewhere in that, there's an opportunity. So can we make it really easy for people to, you know, to harness this power that's in the pockets of their employees or their business partners or their customers? And, and that's where JIX came from. So It's not just about making it easy to build those applications, it's actually also about, but, um, letting them do it in a way where these short engagements and massive increase in productivity is almost guaranteed. Um, you know, so it sounds like a lot, but it's actually a very simple idea and a very simple concept, and we were looking for a very, very simple solution to that. And we've been working for the last year and a half to get there, and it's certainly been a fun journey. We're by no means close to the finish line, but we are seeing the first customers just absolutely falling in love with what we've done. Once they've seen it, they cannot unsee it, and they just almost deploy it exponentially throughout their organization as time goes by. So it's been pretty exciting. It's been an exciting journey for us so far. Dennis, sorry, I didn't mean to go on that long, but I wanted to sketch the background. I think you've been working a lot with customers, so you also understand this a lot better.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I, I think, I mean, you can, you can certainly hear the, hear the passion of the, of the core platform. And I guess, you know, our job is to try and, um, uh, kind of make it simple for customers. And, and look, the most simple thing is, and Ira nailed it right at the end where he said, when you put a JAGS application in front of a customer, um, we've just seen these wonderful reactions from customers. And that's what gets us out of bed in the morning, you know, because Technology can do all sorts of clever things, but often, even if it's incredibly clever in the backend, at the end of the day, customers want to be delighted with what's in front of them. And that's what we, you know, that's really the area where we're focusing on in Jiggs is making the experience unbelievable for customers, and we're getting a good reaction to that. So, you know, I think that's the thing. There's the old analogy of the swan over the lake, where it's beautiful and then a lot of stuff going on under the surface to make that, that happen. And I think that's quite a good analogy here. If you, if you want to put a really good-looking app in front of a business user, which at the same time is authenticated, it's integrated into, for example, the SAP environment, it works offline, it's really quick, you want to do all that magic in the background there's a little bit of kind of complexity that you need to solve there. And that probably describes quite well what we're trying to achieve in Jinx. It's that beautiful front end with that kind of backend technology change that I've described there. And so there's a few pillars in there which might be a place for us to kind of head to next, because, you know, we do think about things very clearly in terms of what we're trying to achieve. And then everything, every kind of You know, everything we focus on is built around these pillars because, you know, otherwise you can get very distracted in this, in this domain and go all over the place. So there's a few pillars that we, we focus on as we, as we think about solving this problem.

Yeah.

And of course, for our listeners out there, Dennis and Adrian, of course, on this podcast we talk a lot about use cases and application of technology. And I think the question I've got for you guys is, you know, what do you think is the most exciting or impactful use cases that can be delivered by the GX platform?

That's a good question, Arno. There's a couple of things. I mean, we, as I mentioned, we built the platform for very specific scenarios where, you know, we feel the criteria fits well. You know, if you are a person who sits in front of your desk, you know, 8 hours a day on your computer actively typing and working on content, you know, JIX will play less of an effective role for that person. We do see that, you know, a significant percentage, and I think it's more than 50% of the world's labor market, is actually not in that position where they sit in front of their computer. So how do you empower them to be successful? How do you empower businesses to be successful? And that's those scenarios that we started out for with JIX. Now it's fascinating, I'll give you I'll give you a couple of use cases, and I'll hand over to Dennis. But we have a very big lubricant company out of Germany— actually, it's not Germany. They're based out of another European company. But they make lubricants, and it's being sold through vehicle consumer, motor vehicle consumer stores. In the US, it's similar to O'Reilly's. I'm not sure what the brands are in Europe. And then garages, and mechanics, and those places, they sell their products. But this company doesn't have a direct relationship with these people. These people work for either other businesses or they own their own businesses. And so how do they stay top of mind with them? How do they send them latest news, announce latest products, make sure that latest training material is available, that if that person— if a car drives into that person's store and they need for a specific kind of lubricant for a vehicle, that there's an easy way for them to identify that their product is the right product and the owner recommends their product as opposed to something else. So we started working with them, and they have about 32,000 of these locations. We built a prototype of TIX for them, which these distributors of theirs, or these dealers, can then download, and immediately the person can use that device, and you can use that to receive all the latest training material, all the latest contract performance that they have signed. They can request recycling services. They can scan a number plate of a car and immediately see what products are relevant to that car. They can send push content, latest promotions, packages, deals that they have to that person's phone. So suddenly you go from being completely disconnected with these 32,000 locations because they don't work for you and they don't belong to you, to being top of mind, um, almost in a, you know, on a constant basis. Um, and it's completely changing the way that they think about how they reach ultimately the end consumer is through a proxy. That's one example. There's a lot of ones. There's one that I'll ask Dennis to talk about where he just now finished working on a scenario for a live service that runs emergency services with helicopters, and they need an application that goes offline and works with them. It's completely on the other side of the spectrum. A hotel group that have the people that do the maintenance within the hotel. This is thousands of people throughout this group that really didn't have any mechanism to easily communicate, to get tasks, to report incidents, to report tasks, to do normal HR stuff, receive training, get important information. And using Jitsi and having this first-class application on the devices, all of that suddenly becomes, becomes, becomes possible. And that list is incredibly long for a business that's— for a little company like ours that's only been around for about 18 months. But Dennis, I mean, again, Dennis is— he heads up everything that has both sales and after-sales to do with our customers. So Dennis, I mean, you're definitely in the position where you see these use cases. It's over to you.

Yeah, cool.

So look, I think the kind of automobile automobile example we've talked to quite well there. But it really is, I mean, I might want to just underline that by saying, if you think about the before and after, so the before is that you've got a bunch of representatives basically running around the country with notepads using relationship-based selling to try and get garage owners to order product. And look, in some instances that's great, it works, and they do, but You know, you can imagine that 5 minutes later their competitor's in the same door and selling them the same products. And you know, what, what's one over the other? Compare that to a situation where you've got an incredibly compelling visual application on your phone where honestly you can just order and self-service yourself straight off that phone. And you know, that's just almost revolutionizing the way that, that, that customer will do business. And I think the interesting thing is, is that that model is not only specific to, you know, this automobile customer, it's basically any customer who's got distribution, you know. So if you think about a one-to-many relationship where you don't have a digital connection with your customer and suddenly now you do, well, you really start to open up, you know, interesting possibilities. So just, you know, following actually that example this morning, in fact, they called me and they said, look, you know, we've got this brilliant app, But we've now got an idea for extension because they're starting to think digitally. They now want to put digital sensors in the oil tanks in the garages that tell them before the customer starts ordering, the oil tank will tell them, hey, you need to order new oil. That will integrate with our phone app and notify the guy. He'll get a notification on his phone saying your oil tank has just hit below 50%, you want to order new oil. So, you know, there, right there is just an evolution of, of this example leading to, to some more interesting scenarios. So, so, you know, exciting possibilities. I'm going to mention probably another one that is probably— well, it's less impactful from a business point of view, but probably could not be more impactful from a, from a day-to-day life point of view, and that's air ambulance services. Where you can imagine a helicopter going off to rescue lives. And it turns out that the complexity of dispatching a helicopter is high, you know. So firstly, you know, what time of day or night are you doing this? How long has the crew been on duty? Is anybody ill? What equipment in the helicopter is there? What crew are there? What risk do they need to assess? And so all of those myriad of decisions that they need to take For every extra second that they spend doing that, there's life on the other end of that decision, right? So, so they want an ability to very quickly assess the risk that they're about to take whilst they're spooling up that helicopter and going to save a life. And again, we've, we've, we've created this app for them that they can do those kinds of things. So kind of assess whether risk people very, very quickly on an iPad app on the knee of a pilot or a co-pilot. as they're getting that helicopter ready to launch. Um, and that, that's been amazing to work on. I mean, that's just been really, really cool. So, so look, there's others we can go through, but you know, from, from those examples, we've, you know, we're working with, with legal companies who want to give again their customers a better insight into what's happening with their case. Um, or insurance brokers that when, you know, when they go out and see their clients better information on their policies and their claims and, you know, kind of what they're doing. So I think it's, you know, it's like I said right in the beginning, we're excited because the possibilities are really interesting. The experience and the change that we think can happen as a result of these apps is fascinating, and it's, you know, it's really deeply kind of entwined or integrated with our passion and our history to use technology to solve these kinds of problems.

That sounds really, really interesting. And we're talking about all the stuff as well here, small businesses as well. And you mentioned that earlier, all these tradesmen these days, isn't it? They don't like to log even into a computer anymore, isn't it? Because it's so tiring for them. So they have the whole business actually Ideally on their phone, isn't it? In their phone.

Yeah, that's very true, Sacha. It's a, you know, between phones and tablets these days, you know, what we see is, and it's not just the small companies, it's actually some of the bigger companies. I mean, I think Marc Benioff is famous for saying that he runs the entire Salesforce from his phone, um, because he can get to everything from there. Um, so I think it, it spans beyond just small businesses and it pretty much empowers people to be, as we said before, sort of focused on microtasks and be highly productive. Now, the important thing as we talk through these use cases to understand about Jexus is that we set out to build a platform and a set of tools that actually allows other people to build and configure these solutions. Right now, we're involved in a lot of them because we're going through early stages, But we are seeing the majority of our opportunities actually coming from early partners, um, you know, who are solution companies building solutions for, for their customers that are seeing the potential and, and seeing the technology being used or showcased. And that's ultimately what we'll be doing, is we'll be going to market through this channel and allowing them to actually build these solutions. And, and then all companies want to use the technology in-house to build these solutions. So the number of use cases will expand pretty dramatically as, as we open up the platform to more and more people to, to use to solve the business problems with. So, ah, exciting.

Cool.

Yeah. Um, hey, I know, I mean, I just sort of follow on from what Sasha said. I mean, the sort of use cases of, um, I'm not, I'm not sure whether tradesperson is the right thing, but, but certainly, you know, if we think about guys doing, you know, electrical or, or gas inspection There's this whole use case of, you know, where do I need to go, what's my most efficient routing, and then, you know, the job of actually being thorough on your checklist as you go through sort of certification of a property. Again, it's an interesting use case of, you know, no computer needed. If you've got a mobile in your pocket, you can get that job done and totally automate that task in a way that's, you know, quite, quite fun, hopefully, rather than being arduous.

So the Jyx platform also supports offline, from what I am seeing, and, and that seems to be quite a compelling offering and a differentiator for you guys. So can you tell us a bit more about the sort of the offline capabilities and where you see that comes into the frame? You mentioned the use case of inspections, perhaps in basements. Up in a helicopter where there's no Wi-Fi connection, for example. So that in itself seems like quite a compelling feature of Jyx.

Yeah, so Arno, offline actually plays two roles and they are equally important. Well, I mean, I guess you can argue three, but on a very high level, it's about experience. Number 1. And number 2, it's about information availability. And we wanted to— if when we looked at all the options that are out there today, every single one of them, taking data from an undefined number of data sources and making that available offline without doing a lot of work is incredibly hard. And I would say it's probably one of the areas where We've developed most of our IP and, and during the first phases of, of developing the software, this is regardless of whether your data is coming from SAP or a web service in the cloud or SQL Server in the cloud or information that you're storing on Google or, or in Amazon or, or even with, with JIX. We wanted to make sure that the experience of accessing that information, number one, is is just absolutely fantastic, which means that we didn't want to deal with the latency of fetching this data or caching this data or only some of the data being partially available. We see that a lot as well. This is, you see a list of customers and we click on the customer, unless you're online, it can't load the detail of the customer and sort of, you know, the fact that you have the list of customers becomes unusable. So, so there was the whole concept around responsiveness of the user experience that that made us invest a lot in how we think about data and the availability and accessibility of data that doesn't necessarily reside on the device. And then the second thing is, is then of course the data itself and the data integrity. Um, having data that is just always there, you don't have to think about the fact that you're walking into a basement and did I sync my data. The data is there and it will be synced and, and it is available, and it's not just the master data that's available, it's everything that you're going to need to use the application successfully is available, and it just works. So there's quite a lot of intelligence around that. There's quite a lot of sort of engineering work that we had to do to make sure that we don't burn through bandwidth, that we make differential, differential data calls. There's a lot that happened to make sure that from a usability point of view, It's always first class and always accessible. Secondly, from a data availability point of view, it's always there. Then the last piece was to make sure that the data is secure. I think we all see the horror stories constantly about data being hacked and data being stolen. The approach that we took there was just— I must say, our guys came up with such a beautiful and simple mechanism where it's impossible to have man-in-the-middle or any form of attack on the data. And then also for compliance, GDPR compliance and things like that, it just works. So yes, certainly data, offline availability of the data, integrity of the data, the data between devices, between devices in the cloud was a big area of focus for us. And we think it will be a significant differentiator with the IP that we've developed there.

Very cool stuff. So yeah, we mentioned we're looking at all sort of intelligent automation, hyperautomation. And so when we look a bit into the future, where do you see things developing for companies? You mentioned maybe a few already, but where do you see developing all this automation, where does it go, all this automation for companies?

Yeah, it's a great question. We certainly, we started, when we started K2, this was in 2000, competitive landscape looked completely different, and even the sort of analyst coverage at that point was very different. In the early days, it was actually really simple. It was just called workflow, because work would flow between people and work would flow between machines. And then, and sort of, the analysts felt at some point that Everybody has done that now, and there's not much more to say about that. And so they switched to BPM, where they call the business process automation, and it sort of elevated, or they felt like it elevated the subject matter to a higher level. And then, of course, all the vendors very quickly read Gartner's paper, and they started making sure that they got all the boxes ticked. And then you show up one morning and sort of everybody's got the BPM box ticked, and then the analysts you know, realized that they need something new to make it now even more interesting. So, they added the S, which was, you know, really added content and, you know, sort of the data that— Oh, there's an echo. Somebody's gonna mute or switch off. Anyway, they added the S, and so the analysts, you know, so now they had BPMS, and suddenly, you know, none of the vendors had it, and they could write their papers again. And then, so the cycle repeated itself, and then they realized, okay, but we now have process automation with content, but what do we do next, and where do we go? And then I think Gartner said, well, let's add an I in front of it. Because he had the iPhone and the iPod, and like he said, the coolest thing will be if we have iBPMS. So of course they had to come up with a term for the i, and intelligence fitted nicely in there. And so suddenly Gartner could write a whole bunch of papers again around iBPMS, and so it evolved. I mean, it was just sort of— and then because then all the vendors added these capabilities, and suddenly i wasn't cool anymore, and And so then they said, well, where do we go next? And they had this big think— it was a massive thing. I mean, I think everybody had to switch off their phones at Gartner for 15 minutes, and they came up with the term hyper. And suddenly we had hyperautomation. In fact, I mean, the whole world came to a standstill. It was a beautiful moment in the industry because suddenly everybody had something to do again. But now we're getting to the point where sort of hyper has also worked its way out. You've got hyperspeed and hyper this and hyperautomation. So I think the next thing, if you go— Supreme. Go look at sort of where the world's going to go. It's going to be ludicrous. We have to have ludicrous automation. So I think the next thing is going to be ludicrous automation, and then all of these vendors will have something to go do again. And Gartner can write all their papers, and people will be happy again. Maybe processes will be automated before they even exist. In our world, we think it's going to go to simplicity, actually. We think all this— complexity and the more complex these quadrants and layers that you have to measure before you realize whether you're doing well or not. We just think that's nonsense. We think the world's actually going to go to a place of simplicity. And behind simplicity sits a lot of technology and a lot of capabilities to make things easy and make it simple. But, you know, already people struggle to, to sit for long durations of time behind machines. So make the tasks smaller, make them easier, make them simpler. Give them the information that they need to do that task immediately. And so we really think it's about getting stuff done. GSD, get shit done. And getting stuff done is going to— the winners are going to be the people who can make things the easiest to do and the simplest to do. And you already, when you go look out there, the cars that are the simplest engineered, like Tesla, it's only got 3 controllers, far outperform and innovate a typical Porsche Taycan that's got 92 controllers. So that world of simplicity, I think, is going to become incredibly important when we look at automation. And the question is, how is that going to be defined and how are we going to get there? We want to play a very small part in that. We integrate into all the BPM vendors out there. Our goal is not to be a BPM vendor. Our goal is to take a very small part of that and make it really easy and beautiful for people to work with. So, you know, we're looking forward to ludicrous automation because I think that's going to create a ton of opportunity.

It definitely requires mobile forms, forms and mobile apps.

Dennis, your view?

Yeah, I think, um, look, I think Adrian's, um, he's made it fun, but, um, I think the one thing I see from the customer's point of view is, is that they're buying outcomes, right?

These days.

So, you know, what we see is maybe in the past, you know, a lot of focus on which technology and how and complexity and et cetera, et cetera. Whereas now a lot of the conversations are with the business saying, you know, I just want to connect better with my customers. And if I can have a very compelling mobile experience that allows me to do that, Show that to me, give it to me. And, you know, there's almost a certain trust that the technology will do what it's doing. So whether we use driving as the analogy or whatever it is, I think very important for me would be just to stress that, you know, customers are buying outcomes these days. They're not interested in how you get there. They want an outcome. And that's what I'm seeing when I talk to customers on a daily basis.

Yes, and of course, you know, Adrian, you touched on the hyperautomation. That is certainly the buzzword of 2021, specifically with the pandemic, where obviously everything was put into accelerated fashion, and digital transformation is also, I guess, lurking there in the background. Obviously, between myself and Sasha, you know, we very much in that space. We talk about everything like automation, I do sometimes feel mobile is slightly neglected because of course we talk about robotic process automation, traditional workflow automation, artificial intelligence, process mining. So, you know, all of the, I guess, the underlying pillars of, of hyperautomation. But, you know, with all of that aside and, you know, all of the buzzwords you say that comes from the analysts, um, You know, what advice would you guys give at JIGS for companies that want to get started with these transformational projects, whether or not being digital transformation, hyperautomation, or just like you said, getting shit done? You know, what is your advice?

I don't know, I think Dennis nailed it where he said, you know, we sort of, we feel at the end of the day when you look back It's not the effort that counts, it's the result. And so I think that you almost have to start there. What is this? What is the thing that you want to accomplish? And what is noise? All the other stuff around it. And sort of, you know, the world has managed to find itself in a place where the more noise there is, the more complex, and the more complex it is, the more important we think things are. It's actually not the case. And again, I go back to, you know, if you look at some of the most innovative moments in life, happens actually around very simple things that just was made easier to do. So, you know, I guess where we sit, and again, keep in mind that we only play a very small, small part of this. You know, I think it's important to understand your business. I think it's important to use all the tools available to implement automation. I think the most important thing is If you were to take all technology off the table, do you understand your business and do you understand how to make that business as easy and as simple as possible to run, and therefore as great an experience for your customers as it is for your staff to provide that services? And, and automation doesn't automatically make a business better. Automation make it faster, you know, and make it easier to make it better, but it doesn't itself define success. So, so Yeah, where we sit on the edge of that, you're right. Whether you want to modernize an application that's been sitting on your desktop, and the tools today to make that easy is actually phenomenal. I mean, you can use RPA tools, you don't need APIs to take what happens on that screen and actually modernize it and make it available on the smaller device. And that's one of the use cases that we see a lot. But I would say at the end of the day, it's about understanding how to introduce simplicity into your business, and that simplicity and the success of that simplicity is measured around the outcomes that you want to achieve. And once you understand that, is to sort of focus on that and get that done and just make the business more effective and efficient. I don't want to trivialize it. I mean, there are some businesses that are incredibly complex. We had the— we were fortunate enough that we could visit Costco and look into the heart of their operations. And I must say, one of the things that stood out for me about that is the absolute extremes to which they've pushed simplicity within that organization. It is just phenomenal where their profitability in their operations and how well that thing is run. And all that these guys did business. They said, we want to run a dead simple business. I mean, it's a phenomenal success, but I can tell you simplicity takes a lot of work. It's easy— it's not easy. It's incredibly hard to keep things simple, um, you know. So, so it's sort of a topic that I think is top of mind for me, um, and, uh, you know, I think there's a, there's a lot of sort of, uh, benefits and truths that comes from, from sitting, you know, looking at within any organization, any size of organization. Dennis, again, I mean, you spend a lot more time with these customers, and I mean, you'll have some interesting perspectives as well.

Look, I think the easiest one for me to point to is I'm just going to come back to outcomes. I mean, you know, when we see customers dreaming about stuff and we turn that dream into something that is, you know, absolutely tangible, they can see it, they see something absolutely visually compelling, they go from dreaming to suddenly seeing reality and they get excited. And I think that that's a very different way of thinking about technology. You know, before, I think when we, you know, when we think about the automation space, as we say, I mean, there's a lot of technologies in the backend that make it a reality, including, you know, we've mentioned some of them, RPA and BPMS and IBPMS and hyperautomation and all these other things we discussed. But at the end of the day, If you can put a beautiful outcome in front of somebody that is going to help them do better digital things with their customers, you know, they get really, really excited. And it's been eye-opening for me to see that with customers, particularly in this mobile space where, you know, it's just— it is beautiful to see eyes opening and smiles on faces and you know, these kind of wow reactions to people seeing these apps. So I'm going to leave it there. I'm going to leave it on the outcome-based approach, which I think is, you know, I think it's going to be important in the year ahead.

Fantastic.

Yeah.

Thank you very much for sharing that. So we and our listeners like to get to know our interview guests a bit more than sort of just technical and the business side, although it's quite exciting and I would love to keep chatting about all that much longer. And probably we will have another session at some point. So that's why we like to ask you both a couple of quick questions. I hope you're okay with some weird questions. So who would like to get started? Or do you like to have your shot on the question?

Each.

Who is your idol and why? Dennis, you go first. Who is your idol? I know who mine is.

Yeah, I'll go first. And I know Adrian is going to be incredibly irritated probably with this one, but I'm going to put Bill Gates up there.

Why would I be irritated with that? But anyway, go ahead.

We've often discussed the to and fro of Mac and Apple and Microsoft and what they've done, what they haven't done. But over the years, I must say, from very early on, I was inspired by what at the time really was— I mean, this is late '80s— was a very young Bill Gates, you know, starting to compete with IBM. And of course, we know now, I mean, it's easy to look back and see what was achieved. But I think beyond that, there's a few things beyond just the software. I think he's, you know, he's applied some of his intellect into other areas and had great results. And I think he continues to try and apply his intellect into, into interesting projects that require that sort of combination of capital and intellect. And I have a lot of admiration for that. So I'll leave it there from the idol point of view.

I am— so I'll add to that, Dennis. I think you'll love my idol. I know, I know you have told him about I regard as well. But I think my— I mean, David Hasselhoff is by far my, my idol. I mean, the guy who could drive the coolest car in the world and then, uh, and then, you know, be a lifeguard for the second part of his life. I mean, that's amazing. I mean, that skill, I think that that's the ultimate, you know, between KITT and, and, uh, I mean, in all seriousness, you know, I think my I think my parents played a huge role. You know, those two people I hold my highest regard with, it's my mom and my dad. And I think my mom sort of, you know, is one that often pops into my head. She played, it made a huge difference in my life, you know, the things she taught me. And she taught me about compassion and, you know, that winning isn't always the most important thing, although it feels painful to come second. You know, make sure that in the process of of winning, you take care of those around you and the people that helped you. And it's never a one-man show, it's always a team effort. I mean, there's so many things. And she never, she never schooled me on those topics. It was just sort of her way of life that influenced me. And, you know, I look back at that and I think, you know, I hope that I can take a little bit of that and pass it on to, you know, the people that's instrumental in my life and that helps me to accomplish the things that we accomplish as a team. You know, and so I would say that's sort of, you know, where, you know, between David Hasselhoff, my mom, I think, you know, I've got two people to live up to.

That's great. I guess with the working relationship you guys have got, I thought Adrian's going to say Dennis is his idol and Dennis, Adrian is his idol.

That would, that would come after a lot of red wine on it. Yeah.

Yeah, this seems like that. Could be a catalyst for a bromance.

We'll move it on, move it on to the next question for you guys.

So, imagine you can get all the contents of a book instantly. Which book would you choose? Adrian?

Yeah, so there's definitely, you know, saying that it's a tough one. I'll give you background. So I suffer from dyslexia and It was something I was pretty shy about and used to hide my whole life. And then I saw my son, who's now 11, going through exactly the same thing, you know, and it's sort of like, you know, learn how to embrace it. So reading has always been very hard for me, but, you know, audiobooks certainly changed it. I fell in love with reading because there's so much information that's available and it's such a wealth of— and the world opens up for you. So it's definitely something that I'm passionate about. I read both fiction— I love fiction— and books that are sort of more non-fiction and that you can learn from. So, you know, calling out two books with the wealth of content and information that's out there is a tough one, but I think that there's two that would stand out for me. And the one, it's just because it's a recent book that I read that I just found was just amazing, is a book called Shoe Dog, and it's the Nike story. And if you haven't read that book, I would highly encourage you to read that book. You know, it's not, again, it's not going to be a master's degree in business. It's about building a real business with real people, with real customers and real challenges. And, you know, I found, I wish I had that book earlier in my life and earlier in my career. And, you know, and I keep it in front of my bed because I refer back to pieces of that when I think about things that's happening or challenges that I face. So, so that's one book. It's a fantastic read and it's a really great great book. And then the other one, which if I could recall anything from a book instantly, it would be Bridge for Dummies. I love playing bridge, the card game, but man, it's got complex rules. And when you sit across the table from a partner and you're sort of 3 rounds into a call to figure out what trumps are going to be and the rules that you have to apply at that point in time to make the perfect call, I would love to have that readily available. So between Bridge for Dummies, which is an absolutely phenomenal game of strategy. If you ever learn to play a card game, learn how to play Bridge. And Shoe Dog, I say, would keep you busy for a while.

And David Hasselhoff autobiography?

I followed his career so closely, I don't have to read his book.

Yes, yourself?

So I was lucky. I grew up in a place where there was, well, there was certainly no internet. It was before that. The era of internet. And in fact, my parents were also anti-television, so there was only one thing you could do in the holidays, and that was read. So I was blessed with that and did a lot of kind of adventure reading and whatever stuff when I was a kid. But the one area where I must say I have— which I have a huge interest in, in fact, remember telling you about this book early on, which was A Pale Blue Dot, a book by a guy called Carl Sagan. Amazing story of the universe and physics and science. And so on and so forth. But all of this stuff comes back to kind of an understanding of physics which has been beyond my, my mental grade. And there is a great book out there, but you— and I must say, I is one of those books that I know I want to read. I'd love to get into my head, but a combination of the intellectual kind of capacity and it's kind of out there for me that I genuinely have a fascination in science towards that. So yeah, that's the one for me.

Great, thank you very much. So what's the best advice you have ever received?

I'll go briefly on that one because my answer is going to be brief and I think I think it's just point— I think there's two things. I mean, grew up with a bunch of mates, some who took themselves quite seriously and others went off and did their thing. And the guys who went off and did their thing and had a passion for it, you know, sort of 25 years later have really turned out— things have turned out really well for them. So I think the advice is follow your passion first and make sure you're having fun and then focus on what you do and make sure you do it really well. So I'll leave it short and sweet. Street like that, that's for me.

Yes. Yeah, I think it's, um, you know, same thing. I mean, you get a lot of advice. I mean, you know, I mentioned earlier my dad taught me early on that, you know, it's okay to fail, um, you know, as, you know, as long as you understand why, and then you bounce back. And, and if you really want to, you know, win, then you got to get back in there and do the hard work to get to the top, you know. But taking risks and failing is fine. That played a big role in my life. I think one of the other things that I learned, which I use a lot, and because the world is really sort of tense at this point, and I think it's always been, but sort of being in the moment right now, the advice that I got from Rudolph that says, "Never make a decision on a high or a low," you know, saved me from making a lot of wrong decisions, you know. And so between taking risks and it being fine to fail as long as you know why you did and bouncing back, and not making decisions, you know, when emotion is high or emotion is low, but when you have all the facts and making a clinical decision. I would say those, those two pieces of advice.

Yeah, very good advice.

A long way in my life. Yeah, thank you.

So then finally, uh, to you guys, um, if you could be an Olympic athlete, um, what sport would you choose?

Look, I'll jump in there. It's simple for me. I mean, I, I have I've got massive respect for all athletes. I mean, the dedication that goes into it and eventually to get to the Olympics is just phenomenal. You know, the one that sort of defies all logic for me, and, you know, I just, I don't know how they do it, are gymnasts, you know, and whether it's, you know, people who work on the bars or the poles or on the floor. But what gymnasts can do with their bodies and the coordination and the sort of, you know, the wherewithal of where you are in the process of executing those moves, just absolutely incredible. I mean, those people for me are just phenomenal. The dedication and the age at which that dedication starts, you know, ultimately too, it's just, it's incredible. But again, I don't want to take anything away from anybody who makes it into the Olympics. It's a phenomenal accomplishment, you know, across all sports. Anyway, Dennis.

Mm-hmm. And maybe you lost Dennis.

Oh, it sounds like he's—

I'm talking to my mute button. You're not going to believe it, but it's a snap. I had that same one written down, but I'll probably qualify it by saying the question was, what would you like to be? And I had to get real with myself and say, look, you'd love to be a gymnast, but you've really got the body of a sumo wrestler, so you should probably get a bit more into realistic about what it is that you want to do. So, but I'll go with gymnast from a wishing point of view and leave it at that. But yeah, tremendous respect for anybody who's got to the Olympics, incredible dedication and passion to get there.

I absolutely agree. I think this is the first interview episode where it's not Usain Bolt, isn't it, Arno? Great. Yeah, thank you very much, guys. So this, this will be sort of the end of our podcast, our interview. Fantastic 50 minutes, 50 minutes, 60 minutes now. So thank you very much for sharing your insights and telling us all about JIX. Yeah, it was a real pleasure and Yeah, it will be great to have you on the podcast again in the future. And yeah, thank you very much for being part of it and speak to you soon. Unfortunately, that's it again with this episode of the Process and Automation Podcast. If you like this episode, please give us a 5-star rating and don't forget to subscribe to this podcast so you so you don't miss any upcoming episode. We hope you will tune in next time, and until then, let's automate it!