There’s one constant in the IT industry, and that’s the change that each wave of innovation brings. In the AI-era, the most astute leaders are embracing this change and exploring just how their teams, organizations and careers can benefit.
I recently sat down with Shawn Landreth, VP of Networking and Network Reliability Engineering at The Capital Group to hear about his career path, life experiences that have contributed to his leadership approach and how he sees AI impacting the world as we know it today.
Read on for an edited and condensed version of our conversation.
Key takeaways
Christina: You’ve had an impressive career spanning several major enterprises. Can you share some highlights of your experience and discuss common threads you’ve observed across IT teams and organizations?
Shawn: I have had the honor of holding IT leadership roles at EDS/HP, Chevron, Google and LinkedIn. Most recently, I’ve been at The Capital Group for the past 6 years. The common challenge I’ve seen at each organization is the struggle to make sense of so much data. Humans are not meant to take in the amount of information we are presented on a daily basis – professionally and personally. Our time is our most valuable asset and with so many priorities demanding it, we need to leverage the assistance of tools, selectively, to make sense of it.
Christina: You’re an accomplished black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and a former Marine who has been deployed overseas. Have you learned any lessons from these experiences that you’ve been able to carry with you into ITOps?
Shawn: I started my career as a Marine, where I really learned the art of remaining calm under pressure. It’s something that I try to bring to my team and any chaotic situation I’m in. Whether you are deployed overseas, in a war room addressing an IT issue, or with your family – people feed off a calm presence and I pride myself in bringing a sense of calm to any situation.
Jiu Jitsu is all about being comfortable in uncomfortable situations. You learn how to stay cool, and think through a challenge while under pressure. When a network is down, that is a very uncomfortable situation. This mindset allows you to take a breath and de-escalate or address the situation with a clear head.
Christina: Speaking of high pressure situations, I hear that right before you walked into an AI Workshop with our team, you had been in a war room call (resolving an IT incident) with 47 people! What was that experience like?
Shawn: Operational interruptions are my biggest challenge, but also inevitable. We had an outage a few weeks ago and the default approach when we don’t know what’s going on is to pull everyone in to troubleshoot. By the time everyone we thought might be needed was rallied, there were 47 other people on the call. A lot of people go into panic mode in these situations and the pressure naturally rises.
I jumped in and calmly started trying to find out what data points we were looking at. I had my team pull up the LogicMonitor dashboards so we could insert data into the discussion and quickly identify the source of the outage. Once we identified the issue, based on alerts that were right there in LogicMonitor, we were able to locate and solve a DNS server issue in 14 minutes.
It’s these situations that are a prime example of why I talk about accountability and ownership with my team so much. If you pull everyone in, it’s everyone’s problem which means it’s actually no one’s problem. Taking charge calmly has a trickle effect, and I’ve seen my team embrace this approach as well.
Christina: Let’s talk about AI and how you see that changing the game. Where do you see that affecting the war room at a tactical level, and then on a more strategic level?
Shawn: AI is something I’m running head-first into, which is no surprise because I love to be an early adopter of all technology. AI presents the potential to impact our business by reducing risk, costs and driving efficiency through better and faster decision making.
As I mentioned earlier, we live in a world of more, more, more. But it’s very overwhelming. At The Capital Group we have over 1000 alerts per day, 30,000 per month which is just not something humans can be on top of. AI, specifically LogicMonitor’s Edwin AI, is going to eliminate that noise for us, and direct the team who is already overwhelmed in the time of an outage, to not have to do the guesswork.
Generative AI will also bring intelligence to the chaos and is the connectivity between data, people in the room and insights leading you to resolution.
Christina: I couldn’t agree more! As someone who values strategic partnerships, what qualities do you look for in a partner company to ensure they share your vision and can help you succeed?
Shawn: I’m bullish on innovation and want my partners to be as well. I love the well-known proverb, ‘If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.’ This sums up how I approach relationships with technology partners like LogicMonitor and know that when we bring the business, smart teams and brilliant technology together, we’re going to achieve great things.
Christina: We are grateful for customers and champions like you. Thanks for the conversation, Shawn.
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