A Conversation With ... Ryan Uzzell

The Southwest Missouri chapter of the AITP is the second fastest growing in the nation, behind Long Island, N.Y., with 216 members. As president, how have you helped facilitate this rapid growth?
The local chapter was started in the 1990s, but I’ve been involved about six years. When I first started, we had about 20 members and they met at The Library Center. I was treasurer at the time. Today, we have 188 members and are the second largest chapter in the United States increasing membership 840 percent during the past six years. That’s out of about 71 chapters in the national organization.

The growth was mainly just getting the word out.

One of the big hurdles we are having right now is encouraging someone who may not be the quote “IT person” at their company, but may have an interest or have a need because they don’t have an IT staff. There is room for that. Some of the presentations do get technical, but some aren’t. Some are high-level business owners. We’d like to foster more of that.  

The annual techITout Technology Showcase and Expo draws hundreds of people from across the nation. What’s makes the Springfield event so popular?
What really started to help (build membership) was the creation of the techITout Technology Showcase and Expo four years ago. Our first year had about 800 attendees, and we’ve been averaging about 600 since. Sept. 18 will be our fourth-annual event at the Oasis Convention Center. It’s an all-day conference, so that’s really helped get the word out. We didn’t really have anything locally that hit technology and was dedicated to technology. We hope to continue to grow that event. Our dream is to develop a Las Vegas-style convention.

We bring in speakers from all over. Our headline presentation last year drew large crowds and was actually a student from MSU. He was testing Google Glass and demonstrated it for the crowd. We’ve had speakers from businesses such as Microsoft. Security is always a hot topic.

TechITout is really our big event for the year as a group. We hope to bring education here locally. We want somewhere where IT professionals can get together for networking. We want to give them information they may not have access to. Having a networking venue for the IT professionals in town and the ability to learn what’s new and what’s coming is the primary goal of the conference and AITP.

Networking is what got me involved in AITP. Being the single IT person at a company, sometimes you don’t have the opportunity to bounce those ideas off of someone. This really helped me and really drew me in.

Is managing IT services for a bank more challenging than a typical business?
Anytime you are in a regulated industry such as banking, there is an added level of security you have to deal with. There are a lot of tools available to help manage that. One of the big concerns right now is mobility and employees having company data on their phones or iPads. Security is always in the forefront. Companies should have a policy in place, but there is technology that can help. MDM software, or mobile device management, is something you can use to secure company data. If an employee had email on their phone and left, I can hit a button that deletes just the email and leaves your personal photos and things of that nature intact.

The use of managed service providers seems to be trending upward for small businesses. What’s the appeal?
I think we are seeing more in recent years because there is a lot of benefit to having an MSP. You, as a small business, might have one IT person, but you might need three or four. If you have XYZ company for your managed service, they have all that infrastructure in place to do it right, protect it, and you are just going to pay a fee. One prime example is here at the bank. Being a smaller bank, we outsource some of our services. With an MSP, you can keep everything with one company.

Lack of control is the downside. They all follow best practices, but the speed at which things can be accomplished is always my biggest gripe. It might take a long time to get one simple thing implemented and that’s just something you kind of have to put up with.