In this sec­ond episode of ASUG Talks: Can­did Career Con­ver­sa­tions, sea­son 2, we talk with Chris Pelchat, Cor­po­rate Tech­nol­o­gy Appli­ca­tions Man­ag­er with the Nebras­ka Pub­lic Pow­er Dis­trict. A full tran­script follows:

ASUG Talks host Lau­rel Nelson-Rowe:

Hel­lo, every­one. Today, I am joined by Chris Pelchat, who is Cor­po­rate Tech­nol­o­gy Appli­ca­tions Man­ag­er with the Nebras­ka Pub­lic Pow­er Dis­trict. Hel­lo, Chris, and wel­come to ASUG Talks: Can­did Career Conversation.

Chris Pelchat:

Good morn­ing. Thank you.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Thank you for join­ing us. Before we get into that deep, can­did career con­ver­sa­tion, I want to have you take a step back. What kind of val­ues and prin­ci­ples from your child­hood have con­tributed to your career and the pro­fes­sion­al that you are today?

Pelchat:

I guess going way back to child­hood, I grew up in Nebras­ka, born and raised, and one of my first pro­fes­sions was a paper route. And deliv­er­ing the Sun­day and Wednes­day papers as a lit­tle kid, trudg­ing through the snow in the mid­dle of win­ter, was a sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenge. But it taught you dif­fer­ent work eth­ic, and not know­ing how heavy the papers were and just get­ting through there and being able to know that you had some­thing that need­ed to be done. I think that instilled a lit­tle bit of the work eth­ic. And you have that with a lot of Mid­west­ern­ers, just on day-to-day, live­stock needs to be tak­en care of. They don’t take hol­i­days. So, I guess that real­ly instilled long­stand­ing work eth­ic with me com­ing from the Midwest.

Nel­son-Rowe:

That per­sis­tence that car­ries through today and even to pub­lic ser­vice, which is what your orga­ni­za­tion stands for. Did you always want a career in infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy? Did you always seek that out?

Pelchat:

I did not. It pret­ty much hap­pened by acci­dent. So, my career, it start­ed off with a mil­i­tary ser­vice out of high school. I was active duty Air Force and got a job when I got out of the Air Force, in Cal­i­for­nia, at the Neva­da test site. Had an oppor­tu­ni­ty to work on the last nuclear test shop we did north of Las Vegas, with the Depart­ment of Energy. 

Nel­son-Rowe:

And you weren’t in infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy at the time?

Pelchat:

No, no. I was in main­ly test equip­ment, mea­sure­ment and test equip­ment. And my wife and I, we moved to San­dia Nation­al Lab­o­ra­to­ries in Albu­querque. I did the same career field, test and mea­sure­ment equip­ment. Moved to Los Alam­os, New Mex­i­co, and worked at the nation­al labs there. And as our kids start­ed school years, I noticed that there was some­thing clos­er to home and Nebras­ka had a nuclear pow­er plant and end­ed up get­ting a job there. Got into project management.

I missed the mil­i­tary, so I got back in the Army Nation­al Guard at the time. I led projects at our nuclear plant for 10 years and had a job to move to the fos­sil side. So, I was doing large pip­ing replace­ments, things like that, big phys­i­cal things, and was asked by my boss to help with the back­up data center.

It was close to done, let’s just push that project over the edge. I said, ​“Well, sure, I’ll look into it.” Gath­ered a team togeth­er and learned a lot, but not all IT is peo­ple that are fix­ing your com­put­er. There’s wires, there’s net­works, there’s infra­struc­ture, there’s appli­ca­tions. It was an eye-open­ing thing to me, but the project spon­sor was our CIO, and she liked the way that I put the project together. 

And our pre­vi­ous cor­po­rate appli­ca­tions man­ag­er was retir­ing, and I had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to apply for a knowl­edge reten­tion posi­tion, work­ing along­side him while I was man­ag­ing the S4 project. That’s how I end­ed up in IT and haven’t looked back since. The oth­er thing from the mil­i­tary side is the mil­i­tary always looks at their IT resources as a very strate­gic asset. And now sit­ting on the civil­ian side, I real­ize the impact that IT can make to the busi­ness. And that’s the excit­ing piece of it. That’s real­ly excit­ing, just based off the tra­jec­to­ry of where we’re going.

Nel­son-Rowe:

So, you car­ried that influ­ence from your mil­i­tary back­ground into the acci­den­tal appli­ca­tion man­ag­er role, I guess?

Pelchat:

Exact­ly. Yep.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Kind of an acci­den­tal tourist. So, the project man­age­ment was tru­ly your first role work­ing with IT and with SAP, is that correct?

Pelchat:

I’d done finan­cials in SAP at the nuclear pow­er plant, but that was my first intro­duc­tion to using SAP. And so now com­ing from the pow­er plant, the end-user side, to cor­po­rate appli­ca­tions man­ag­er and see­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ties, when we tran­si­tion to S/4, all the dif­fer­ent inter­ac­tions, all the dif­fer­ent pieces, all the dif­fer­ent func­tion­al man­agers that you work with and see how it can pro­vide a pos­i­tive impact from an enter­prise solu­tion. That’s what I learned through the S4 project as that pro­gram man­ag­er imple­ment­ing that.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Would you say that you’re an active career path plan­ner, respon­sive career oppor­tunist, or a hybrid?

Pelchat:

I’m a plan­ner by trade. That’s what I real­ly like, long-range plans and every­thing else. So, even with the staff that I work with, you’re always try­ing to train your­self for your next posi­tion, make sure that you’re becom­ing an expert in the posi­tion you’re in, but what’s the next aspi­ra­tion? Where are you try­ing to go, so I can help sup­port that move, I can sup­port that development? 

With the acci­den­tal move to IT, it changed the dif­fer­ent pos­si­bil­i­ties mov­ing for­ward, but I had one track in mind to where I was going, based off of this new oppor­tu­ni­ty. Now, I have to rede­fine where that track­’s going, but I’m still look­ing at, ​“Okay, what are the next steps? And what do I need to do to devel­op myself to get there?”

Nel­son-Rowe:

As you man­age oth­er peo­ple, do you apply that mind­set as well, in help­ing them in their careers?

Pelchat:

Yes. What I’ve found in IT is you have peo­ple that become crit­i­cal to your suc­cess and you don’t have three sub­ject mat­ter experts in that par­tic­u­lar area. A lot of times you have a sin­gle-point vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty of this skillset, but it’s still your respon­si­bil­i­ty as a man­ag­er to make sure that if their aspi­ra­tions are to go some­where else, what are their goals? What are their career aspi­ra­tions? Where do they want to go? How do you alle­vi­ate that sin­gle point vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, so you open up the option for them to achieve where they want to go?

Nel­son-Rowe:

Great. Thank you for that. Now, I’m going to offer a light­ning round oppor­tu­ni­ty. At ASUG Talks we like to chal­lenge our guests. So, from an IT per­spec­tive, since you entered the halls of IT and SAP, recap in two min­utes or less, what have been your career highlights?

Pelchat:

My career high­lights would be the S/4HANA project. It’s because I got intro­duced to the enter­prise busi­ness solu­tion. It was drink­ing from a fire hose. I did­n’t real­ize that NPPD, this small Mid­west­ern util­i­ty, was one of the first to real­ly make the leap to imple­ment S/4, until we pre­sent­ed out at SAP4U. And there was so much inter­est in, ​“How do you do this in such a short peri­od of time?”

For our folks, they rolled up their sleeves and just got after it. And see­ing the response, it was one of those things to where I wish the entire team, because we prob­a­bly had 200-plus folks that touched that project in some way, shape, or form, the accom­plish­ment of going live, going live on time, the imple­men­ta­tion of S4, SAC plan­ning, BW on HANA, and a lot of oth­er pieces of that project, I did­n’t real­ly appre­ci­ate until after the fact, what that team had accom­plished. So, that would def­i­nite­ly be my biggest point of pride for what that team accomplished.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Is that your favorite job role, respon­si­bil­i­ty, or is there some­thing else that’s up on the favorites list?

Pelchat:

I guess that would be my favorite and then the next is real­ly see­ing some of our staff that have been with SAP since ​’99 – since we imple­ment­ed in ​’99 – see­ing the new excite­ment with the new tools and learn­ing new things, because the mind­set shift, you used to be able to install a sys­tem, become an expert in it, and it did­n’t change. With tech­nol­o­gy chang­ing rapid­ly nowa­days, you have to shift that mind­set to where you con­stant­ly have to be learn­ing and you con­stant­ly have to be evolv­ing and see­ing what the pos­si­bil­i­ties are.

Think­ing through the pos­si­bil­i­ties, ​“How can we change the way we do busi­ness to help our func­tion­al areas oper­ate more effi­cient­ly, more effec­tive­ly? How do we lever­age the tech­nol­o­gy to become that force mul­ti­pli­er that we real­ly should be from the busi­ness side?” So, see­ing that excite­ment in some of my staff that have been with SAP since ​’99.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Wow, that is a long dura­tion in and of itself. As you reflect back, what’s been most chal­leng­ing in terms of your role or set of respon­si­bil­i­ties to-date and why? And how have those chal­lenges shaped you?

Pelchat:

I think being new to the IT world and also being with an orga­ni­za­tion that we imple­ment­ed ECC back in ​’99, so a lot of that tech­nol­o­gy did­n’t change. So, there was a rapid shift, a rapid change with when I stepped into it, as far as the move­ment to S4, things chang­ing. On the nuclear side, we bench­mark very well, because if some­body has a bad day, it’s bad for the entire nuclear industry.

Under­stand­ing and find­ing, ​“How do I net­work with peo­ple? How do I find my peers that are strug­gling with some of the same issues that I’m hav­ing?” And estab­lish­ing those touch points or peo­ple that I can reach out to, so that we’re not going through tri­al and error to fig­ure out how to do things. There’s been some­body who’s gone down this path before. And just com­pare and con­trast on, ​“Okay, what is the approach that we want?” Because there’s always safe­ty in num­bers. You nev­er real­ly want to be that guinea pig of, ​“Yep, I’m going to try and fig­ure it out and let’s hope that every­thing works out.”

Nel­son-Rowe:

You don’t want to be out on an island?

Pelchat:

No. No. That’s not a good place to be.

Nel­son-Rowe:

What’s been your best career deci­sion or your best career move­ment, and why was that the best?

Pelchat:

I think this goes back to acci­den­tal, and it pret­ty much opened my mind to how things were. On the mil­i­tary side, I was hap­py teach­ing. I was in an offi­cer can­di­date pro­gram to where I was instruct­ing lead­ers how to become com­mis­sioned offi­cers, and I loved it. It was devel­op­ing oth­ers for lead­er­ship oppor­tu­ni­ties. You could be rec­om­mend­ed by your lead­er­ship to serve as the aide-de-camp for the state’s adju­tant gen­er­al. And my super­vi­sor said, ​“Hey, Chris, we think you’d be a good fit for this. You got a deploy­ment under your belt, you’ve been a com­pa­ny com­man­der. We think this would be a good devel­op­ment oppor­tu­ni­ty.” I’m like, ​“Nope, I’m good. I want to stay here. I’m com­fort­able. I like what I’m doing.”

And I thought that was the last I heard of it, until I got a phone call from our two-star gen­er­al that said, ​“Hey, Chris, I’d like you to be my aide-de-camp.” So, I keep his sched­ule, ran secu­ri­ty, and we would make vis­its to our con­gres­sion­al del­e­ga­tion in DC and go to the Pen­ta­gon. And I thought, ​“Okay, I did­n’t real­ly want this.” But work­ing under that indi­vid­ual who – he was an Air Force two-star gen­er­al, and he had a mind­set of ser­vant lead­er­ship. And he told me, ​“The high­er you move in an orga­ni­za­tion, the more peo­ple you have to serve. And there are oppor­tu­ni­ties that present them­selves, that you may not expect, but always take on those chal­leng­ing opportunities.”

And he had one oth­er quote, I have it on my white­board here. It says, ​“Excel­lence is nev­er an acci­dent.” And just the things I learned from him over the three years I served with him, have served me very well on the civil­ian side and it applies over and over and over again with how you approach serv­ing the peo­ple that you work with. And that’s a mind shift that I had ver­sus just climb­ing a career lad­der before. So, I would say that was prob­a­bly the best deci­sion that I did­n’t make, but I did make, that helped me with my career path.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Would you con­sid­er that indi­vid­ual a men­tor, an advo­cate? In addi­tion to the ser­vant lead­er­ship, was he quite inspirational?

Pelchat:

He is very inspi­ra­tional, because I always got to trav­el with him to see the dif­fer­ent sol­diers train­ing, the dif­fer­ent air­men train­ing. I got to see how he inter­act­ed with our con­gres­sion­al del­e­ga­tion. I saw how he approached meet­ings, how he approached prepa­ra­tion for meet­ings. And he would always take the time when we were trav­el­ing togeth­er, to get my opin­ion. Because I had been on the flip side before, I felt weird just sup­port­ing him. And he said, ​“This is for your devel­op­ment. This is for me to help devel­op you on how I process infor­ma­tion, how I scan infor­ma­tion, how I inter­act, some of the stuff that we do up front.”

So absolute­ly, he was a men­tor and to this day he still is a men­tor to me. And prob­a­bly one of the biggest com­pli­ments I’ve ever got­ten was, he came and spoke when I worked at the nuclear pow­er plant, to our lead­er­ship. And one of my direct reports sat in that meet­ing and he told me, he said, ​“I see exact­ly a lot of him in you.” And so for me, there could­n’t have been a big­ger com­pli­ment to me.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Proud moment.

Pelchat:

Yeah.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Is there any­thing in your career or in any of the roles that you’ve had, that you’d like to do over?

Pelchat:

Yes, and it’s tak­ing the time to acknowl­edge the pos­i­tive things. You’re always try­ing to find gaps, you’re always look­ing for how to improve. You’re always push­ing your­self or, ​“Hey, that did­n’t go exact­ly as we had planned.” And even the ​‘aha’ moment when I saw all the inter­est out at SAP4U on the work that we did with S/4HANA. As we were going through that project, I did­n’t acknowl­edge the team enough on the accom­plish­ments along the way.

That’s a skill that I need to work on, is you can have very high stan­dards, you can strive for excel­lence, but you also have to real­ize the progress that you’re mak­ing along the way and cel­e­brate those suc­cess­es through­out the project. Because if you don’t take the time to acknowl­edge the work that your team is doing, soon­er or lat­er they’ll get into fatigue and you have to con­tin­ue moti­vat­ing them. And it’s a skill that I wish I was bet­ter at, and I’m actu­al­ly learn­ing quite a bit from our CIO, who’s very good at that, help­ing devel­op that skill with­in me.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Just tak­ing the time to lis­ten and learn and appre­ci­ate, either from those team mem­bers that are at your peer set, on your project teams, etc. Great les­son to apply every day. As you reflect on a career and expe­ri­ence, what edu­ca­tion and train­ing expe­ri­ences have been most essen­tial to your success?

Pelchat:

I would say, infor­ma­tion gath­er­ing, whether it’s bench­mark­ing, using some of the dif­fer­ent bench­mark­ing orga­ni­za­tions that are out there. There’s mul­ti­ple, but find­ing those and going through data, look­ing through exam­ples. Because you can sit in class­rooms and you can only learn so much, but I’m a visu­al type per­son, I like to see tem­plates. I like to see, how did some­body else approach this prob­lem? How did some­body else dis­sect this problem?

Get­ting a team togeth­er to real­ly solve, ​“Hey, we’ve got this issue, how do we solve that issue as a team?” Because you real­ly, you don’t have to solve issues on your own, and some­body’s gone down that road before, and real­ly try­ing to get as many data points as pos­si­ble, being able to look at as many doc­u­ments as pos­si­ble. How many peo­ple have tried to solve this prob­lem? These peo­ple did this, these peo­ple did this, this com­pa­ny did this, this com­pa­ny did this. And come up with the best solu­tion that works for the sit­u­a­tion that you’re in. 

Nel­son-Rowe:

And you find those resources both with­in the util­i­ty com­mu­ni­ty as well as with­in the SAP pro­fes­sion­als’ com­mu­ni­ty, correct?

Pelchat:

Yes, it’s in the util­i­ties com­mit­tee, it’s in the SAP, ASUG, your dif­fer­ent chap­ters and things like that. But it can also be out­side util­i­ty, because a lot of the work process­es, the process­es that we do, it does­n’t have to be, ​“Well, we can’t use this because it’s not a pub­lic util­i­ty that has gen­er­a­tion, dis­tri­b­u­tion, and trans­mis­sion.” We always think we’re so spe­cial, we’re not.

Nel­son-Rowe:

It does­n’t have to be a com­plete par­al­lel to your organization?

Pelchat:

Yeah. There are so many things that you can learn from any type of orga­ni­za­tion on how they man­age data, how they look at this, how they look at that. Those process­es can tran­si­tion across a lot of dif­fer­ent orga­ni­za­tions. And a lot of how we man­aged on the mil­i­tary side of the house, that tran­si­tioned very well on how you man­age peo­ple on the civil­ian side of the house. It’s just ter­mi­nol­o­gy changes, but the process­es are the same. So it’s, what can we learn from this? What can we take away, and what can we apply? And how can we apply it in our situation?

Nel­son-Rowe

What are the three things that you’ve learned from being in this field of IT and using SAP sys­tems and solu­tions, that peo­ple should know for their own career success?

Pelchat:

They should learn, they don’t have to solve every­thing on their own. There’s a com­mu­ni­ty out there that can help you with almost any­thing you’re strug­gling with. Sec­ond piece, if you touch one thing in an enter­prise busi­ness solu­tion, it’s prob­a­bly going to touch mul­ti­ple areas of that solu­tion. So, mak­ing a sim­ple change in one place, you have to be care­ful of sec­ond and third order effects.

And the last piece, SAP is not just an IT project, prod­uct. You have to have your func­tion­al or busi­ness man­agers along for the ride. Make sure that they’re bought into what it can do. Make sure that you’re work­ing with them, you’re edu­cat­ing them. That they’re a piece of your col­lec­tive team.

That’s prob­a­bly some­thing that I think it falls through the cracks, from where I’ve seen is, you spend so much time think­ing about the tech­nol­o­gy that you for­get about the user expe­ri­ence and the func­tion­al area man­ag­er that can real­ly help you come up with a much bet­ter solu­tion. You’re just so zoned in on the tech­ni­cal piece of it that you for­get that there’s a much big­ger oppor­tu­ni­ty there for you. And if you’re work­ing with those folks, it’s going to be mul­ti­ple times a bet­ter return on invest­ment on how they use the tech­nol­o­gy and how you work togeth­er going forward.

Nel­son-Rowe:

The results are bet­ter, the out­comes are bet­ter, and the embrace of the sys­tem and the appli­ca­tion is stronger?

Pelchat:

We had an SAP Nebras­ka day and I did a lot of arm twist­ing with our finance man­agers. And I said, ​“Oh, you’ve done phe­nom­e­nal things with the S/4 project and SAC plan­ning. I think you guys should go to this SAP work­shop in Nebras­ka with the oth­er util­i­ties.” And their first thought or response was, ​“Well, that’s IT.” And I’m like, ​“No. It’s some­thing phe­nom­e­nal that you’ve done, that they’ve done, to be able to use the tool and actu­al­ly push us for­ward. How they’ve adopt­ed Fiori and some of the oppor­tu­ni­ties that they have there.”

And now we have oth­er util­i­ties reach­ing out to them from their finance man­agers going, ​“How did you do this? How did you learn this?” And to me, that’s awe­some. That’s amaz­ing that we have folks that embrace that and want to do that and want to move the orga­ni­za­tion forward.

Nel­son-Rowe:

So, that dynam­ic is strong but not nec­es­sar­i­ly shared by the finance team and those who are actu­al­ly dai­ly users out­side the four walls. That’s the next step?

Pelchat:

Exact­ly.

Nel­son-Rowe:

You’ve kind of hint­ed at this, but I want to ask very direct­ly, why are you so pas­sion­ate about what you do today?

Pelchat:

I think it goes back to that ser­vant lead­er­ship. I see an oppor­tu­ni­ty here, and the unique thing about Nebras­ka is we’re an all-pub­lic-pow­er state. We’re rate pay­ers, we’re respon­si­ble for our elec­tric­i­ty rates, we’re respon­si­ble about the ser­vice that we have, and our cowork­ers are our cus­tomers. And so, real­ly see­ing the oppor­tu­ni­ty of what we have right now with the move to S4 and how can we lever­age it, how can we help improve how that tech­nol­o­gy helps the peo­ple we work with, helps our cus­tomers, helps our bot­tom line? How do we get the most out of the invest­ments that we’ve spent, that we’re respon­si­ble to our rate payers?

And so, it’s that ser­vant lead­er­ship. It’s that dri­ve. How do we get more out of it? How do we work smarter, not hard­er? How do we lever­age the tech­nol­o­gy and learn it? That’s the oth­er piece of it. There’s a lot of things that it can do, that we nev­er real­ly knew before or did­n’t take the time to ful­ly grasp what that capa­bil­i­ty is.

And so, it’s an excit­ing time for our team, for our com­pa­ny, and ulti­mate­ly, I hope, for our rate pay­ers. IT can be become that strate­gic asset, that force mul­ti­pli­er for the orga­ni­za­tion to con­tin­ue to do great things. As a ser­vant leader, I look at my retail folks or my finance folks: if I’m not mak­ing their life bet­ter through tech­nol­o­gy this year, then I’m prob­a­bly not meet­ing the mark we’ve set for ourselves.

Nel­son-Rowe:

I want­ed to ask you, in terms of resources, pro­fes­sion­al resources, what are the most help­ful resources, includ­ing any­thing that you’ve uti­lized from ASUG, that are most impor­tant in your career to-date and your career going forward?

Pelchat:

I’m a chap­ter mem­ber for the Mid­west Cen­tral chap­ter of ASUG. Being able to meet oth­er SAP users, being able to tap into a lot of the dif­fer­ent mate­r­i­al that’s out on the ASUG web­site, being able to go to the SAP4U con­fer­ence out in San Diego and meet some of those oth­er util­i­ties, have some of those dis­cus­sions on, ​“Hey, how did you solve this prob­lem?” Share infor­ma­tion with them. Mark Rosson from Sno­homish has been a huge help to me, as far as when I can reach out, going, ​“Hey, Mark, have you run into this prob­lem before?”

North­west­ern Ener­gy, they went to S/4 prob­a­bly two weeks before we did. We’ve reached out to them just based off of that per­son­al con­nec­tion, when we con­nect­ed out at SAP4U. But being able to talk to one anoth­er on, ​“Hey, how did your end-of-year updates go? Did you run into any prob­lems? We ran into this prob­lem, but make sure that you have this note from SAP.”

Being able to work with SAP, some of their cus­tomer suc­cess rep­re­sen­ta­tives on dif­fer­ent tools that you’re look­ing to adopt or use, whether it’s your Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form or Fiori, how you set up the gov­er­nance around some of those launch­pads. It’s the net­work and the com­mu­ni­ty and being a part of ASUG, being a part of SAP, and being a demand­ing cus­tomer to your SAP account rep­re­sen­ta­tive, going, ​“I need to talk to some­body about this. I need to talk to some­body who’s like me, about this, this, and this.” Don’t be afraid to do that. You absolute­ly have the right to be a demand­ing cus­tomer because it is a very com­plex tool. But it can do a lot of things for you and we should want to be able to get the most out of our investments.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Great. Now, this has been a great con­ver­sa­tion, but I have one final ques­tion and it’s a lit­tle bit cre­ative, a lit­tle bit off the beat­en path. If you could have had, at the start of your career and through­out your career, one super­pow­er to be bet­ter at your job, bet­ter at the SAP use and imple­men­ta­tions and projects, what would that super­pow­er have been, or what do you need today?

Pelchat:

I can tell you with­out a doubt, if I could process infor­ma­tion faster. If I could go through infor­ma­tion and learn it faster and have that knowl­edge reten­tion, because tech­nol­o­gy is chang­ing so fast. We are inun­dat­ed with so much infor­ma­tion and some­thing new is right around the cor­ner every quar­ter, as far as an update or, ​“What about mov­ing to the cloud? What about RISE? What about that module?”

And being able to digest all the infor­ma­tion that’s com­ing at you, day after day, after day, and to be able to make sense of it. My super­pow­er would be how to process and make sense of all that infor­ma­tion and put it into a strat­e­gy going for­ward. Being able to make sense of that data would be phenomenal.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Process accel­er­a­tor and reten­tion base. All right. Any­thing else that you’d like to share with the ASUG audi­ence before we close out?

Pelchat:

I would just say, expect the most out of the invest­ments that you get and squeeze the most out of what you pur­chase, and be that demand­ing cus­tomer. And if you don’t know the answer, there are peo­ple out there that absolute­ly have gone through what you’ve gone through and want to help you. That’s the key, is there are peo­ple out there that absolute­ly want to help you. So, don’t feel alone if you’re strug­gling with some­thing, try and reach out and some­body will be out there to help you.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Don’t shy away, speak up. And what’s on that white­board again?

Pelchat:

“Excel­lence is nev­er an accident.”

Nel­son-Rowe:

All right. Thank you for the excel­lent con­ver­sa­tion and for shar­ing your can­did career con­ver­sa­tion, your ups and downs, and your acci­den­tal entry into IT. 

Pelchat:

You’re wel­come. Thank you.