IGHS32 - Interview with Jordan Uytterhagen, Cadence Solutions (Microsoft Partner)

Jim Merrifield (00:01.236)
Well, hello and welcome to the InfoGov hot seat. I'm your host Jim Merrifield and with me today is Jordan Uytterhagen at Cadence Solutions. Welcome Jordan.

Jordan Uytterhagen (00:09.595)
Thanks, Jim. Glad to be here.

Jim Merrifield (00:11.252)
Yeah, thanks for taking the time to sit in the hot seat and allow us to ask you a few questions. Let's kick it off here. Can you give me a brief introduction of yourself, your current role, and one fun fact about yourself? Don't forget the fun fact.

Jordan Uytterhagen (00:26.203)
 right, I'm Jordan Uytterhagen founder and CEO of Cadence Solutions. We're a Microsoft systems integrator firm that focuses on Purview, SharePoint Online, and SharePoint Premium. Fun fact about myself that's fairly current is in about 30 days, I'm gonna trap my two kids and my wife in a motorhome and drive 10 ,000 miles across America on a once in a lifetime trip.

Jim Merrifield (00:50.708)
awesome. That's great. Any particular sites that you want to see? I don't want to spoil it for the wife and kids, but anything particular?

Jordan Uytterhagen (00:57.211)
 all on board. We're going to about 15, 16 different cities down the West Coast, across through the Grand Canyon, Dallas, down to Disney World, of course, up to New York, and then probably over to see Mammoth Caves and all the way back home. So it's going to be an adventure. It's a testament to going to family get along for 46 days and can Cadence operate without Jordan for 46 days as well.

Jim Merrifield (01:21.844)
Yeah.

Jim Merrifield (01:26.42)
Yeah, yeah, we'll have to see. We'll have to see what happens. No, that's awesome. You enjoy it. So listen, I know you've been a busy, busy person going around different conferences and things. And I met you earlier this month at ARMA Canada Conference in Calgary. Just wanted to ask you a few questions about the conference. How was your experience at the event?

Jordan Uytterhagen (01:47.547)
 great. Yeah. I've been attending ARMA Canada for probably coming up on a decade. I, you know, I do the conference circuit in spring and then there's quite a few to go to. So it was the fourth of four on the circuit this year. and the thing I like about it the most is it's actually a community vibe at that one. It's, it's not a salesy conference. It's not a software vendor, announcing new functionality and, you know, trying to pipe you up or pump you up to buy, buy something.

It's very grassroots and sales -oriented, or community -oriented instead of sales -oriented. The benefit I see is like they end up being very regional as well. So it was in Calgary, there were a lot of Saskatchewan folks, Alberta and British Columbia, a few made the trip like you, Jim, from out of town, but it's good to see those folks every year.

Jim Merrifield (02:40.628)
Yeah, for sure. I was pumped that I got to, my wife and I got to explore Banff a little bit. We didn't see any grizzly bears, but we saw a few deer. But we'll have to, yeah, probably, right? Because I forgot my bear spray. So was there a particular session or a networking event that you especially enjoyed at the conference this year?

Jordan Uytterhagen (02:51.291)
It'll be a good thing.

Jordan Uytterhagen (03:04.027)
The networking event in Armour Canada has got to be the Trivia Night. So that's iconic. I was pestering Trevor Banks about that online prior to the conference saying, are we doing this again? Because post -COVID, kind of getting this thing launched. And him and Courtney did a really good job hosting that. So for the folks that don't know, there's a Trivia Night during the ARMA Canada conference. It's a bit of a fundraiser as well for some scholarships for folks in the industry. And it's usually well attended. You hosted it like a...

brew pub or a bar of some sort, have a great time for a couple hours, answer some InfoGov questions and a lot of other ones that may be a little harder in terms of geographic or other kind of Jeopardy -style questions. And you get this really unique award, this plaque of a wooden beaver that's, it's serious but also a gag gift and maybe Jim you have a photo of that to throw up on this later, but it's hilarious. So it's a really good event.

Jim Merrifield (04:00.852)
Yeah, I'm gonna have to dig up a photo. It was a wonderful experience. This was my first time at Trivia at ARMA Canada, but it was definitely an awesome experience for sure. How about education? Did you learn anything new at the event?

Jordan Uytterhagen (04:16.891)
I did appreciate the AI presentations, although AI is maybe becoming a bit nauseating with it being at every keynote, but I appreciated the one that kind of dug deeper from Amii which is one of the machine learning institutes here in Alberta, that dug into the how it operates as opposed to the concept of why you need to use it. I thought that was really, as a former technical guy, I really paid attention in that one and appreciated that.

The success stories from, you know,

records managers that have had a project, you know, launched properly and also some of the horror stories you hear. I always like to hear those as well in the sessions because everyone can learn from those and we're glad that they're shared both positively and negatively. We don't just want, you know, rainbows and sunshine every time. We want to actually, you know, hear some of the battle scars and the wounds that happened along the way that we can learn from as an industry.

Jim Merrifield (05:15.476)
Yeah, for sure. I think the keynote that you were alluding to, I thought initially it was going to be a little more technical than a little over the audience's head. But I tell you, after talking to some of the attendees in the sessions, people learned quite a bit from that session.

Jordan Uytterhagen (05:37.371)
Yeah, and to pile on that one, Jim, I think that's not expected at the ARMA Canada Conference, like that kind of session. So kudos to the planning committee there to bring in that type of topic. We've been through a lot of key notes that are, you know, they can kind of end up being vanilla the same year over year, but that one was definitely those two stood out a lot.

Jim Merrifield (05:58.004)
Yeah, no, thanks for sharing that. So I mean, the conference is great, obviously looking forward to next year's event. But in more exciting news, I saw last week hit the news that ARMA and Cadence entered into a new exciting partnership. Can you talk about that a bit?

Jordan Uytterhagen (06:15.195)
Yeah, absolutely. So we've been a big ARMA supporter for a number of years, prior board member in a chapter as well. And kind of got working with the ARMA executives looking at extending our training offering, which focuses specifically on Microsoft Purview in records management, e -discovery and data loss prevention. And I got into a conversation with them saying this has been really popular for us. We get a lot of ARMA members joining the training.

It's two to three days, depends which course you join, virtual training, which is hands -on to learn Purview from a records eDiscovery or DLP angle. So that's now offered through ARMA. There's an official communication that went out the week of May 21st. And it can be, I guess, added to your cart, so to speak, from the ARMA side of things. And there's a discount as well on it. So everybody kind of wins. Really excited to get kind of going on that with ARMA.

Jim Merrifield (07:12.82)
Yeah, I think we're all excited. Now who would attend those? I know you mentioned ARMA members, but is there a specific skill set that maybe you're targeting for this training course?

Jordan Uytterhagen (07:24.155)
Yeah, we get, it's kind of interesting when we get the attendees. So we get your traditional records manager that's now skilling up and getting into purview. And that's even prior to purchase. So if they're looking at moving from an E3 to E5 and opening the box and getting more functionality, they'll take the training to kind of learn what they should focus on as they embark on a deployment. We also get quite a few IT system administrators and that blending of security and records.

in the Purview platform has lent to that audience attending the training. So they're like, I'd like to know enough to carry the conversation as an IT administrator with the records and the legal and the risk folks because Purview essentially starts with IT and then we try to get it unlocked and portions of it granted access to the records folks. And another kind of interesting thing with the training is we get a lot of groups from the same organization in the same session.

So companies aren't just sending one person, they'll send, I'm gonna send two IT administrators, two InfoGov people, and then kind of circle back after, which I found really interesting. We didn't expect that in terms of the attendees. And the value they get out of it's great, and it's a hands -on environment, which is really why we launched it. We saw a gap in training even for sending my folks to where none of it was hands -on, it was all theoretical, or someone's clicking through a PowerPoint, which only gets you so far. We set up a lab.

give you a login, give you access to the lab after the session's over. And you can actually build your own labels, run your own dispositions, really have a bit of a playground in a sandbox so you can learn. My style's always been that way. If you give me a book, I'll read it. I'll forget 90 % of it right after I'm done. If you give me something to play with, I'm going to remember how I made it work or didn't make it work or solved that problem along the way.

Jim Merrifield (09:09.524)
No, that's exciting. And what company these days doesn't use some aspect of Microsoft. So very exciting.

Jordan Uytterhagen (09:14.907)
Maybe Google, that's probably it.

Jim Merrifield (09:19.892)
Yeah, Google, that'd be interesting, right? Google might use Microsoft. That'd be an interesting concept to explore. Well, listen, Jordan, thanks so much for answering a few of these questions. Are there any final thoughts you want to leave the audience with that we didn't discuss?

Jordan Uytterhagen (09:23.451)
Yeah.

Jordan Uytterhagen (09:34.331)
Looking forward to seeing anybody at the ARMA InfoCon InfoNext or the next ARMA Canada conference because we'll be at all of them Big supporters of the community and if you want to reach out to me, I'm on LinkedIn If you could spell my last name, you'll find me there. So I'm the only one

Jim Merrifield (09:50.644)
Yeah, likewise. Look forward to seeing you. And yeah, Jordan's always posting, you know, check out his post recently last week. It might scare the heck out of you on about Co-pilot and ChatGPT I won't say anything more, but yeah, check out his post. It was, it was very interesting. A lot of conversation there, but again, Jordan, thanks so much for spending some time with us on the hot seat. Enjoy your trip. If I don't see you before then well deserved and.

Of course, if you want to be a guest like Jordan on the hot seat, all you got to do is go to our website Infogovhotseat.com submit your information, and we'll get you on the schedule. So thank you so much and enjoy the rest of your day.

Jordan Uytterhagen (10:29.563)
That's good. Thanks, Jim.