Ep#154 Faces in FinOps Highlights with Marit Hughes @ Deloitte

Host: Jon

Hi everybody and welcome to the Faces in #FinOps podcast, powered by Prosper Ops. I'm your host, Jon Myer. The Faces in #FinOps podcast is about highlighting thought leaders in the cloud financial management space and how they're making an impact not only within their organization but within the broader #FinOps community. Today's guest is Marit Hughes, a specialist master at Deloitte. Marit spent over a decade working with a w s billing and account management both in the public sector and commercial industries. She is now bringing her expertise to Deloitte to help federal, state, and local governments implement their agencies where she focuses on the importance of cost-aware culture. Please join me in welcoming Marit to the show Marit. How are you?

Guest: Marit

I'm doing okay. I'm a little concerned about being considered a thought leader. That sounds very impressive and I'm not sure that I am that, but I have been around the block of time or two and all it teaches me is there's so much more to learn.

Host: Jon

So you're concerned about the thought leader, but you have the title A specialist master.

Guest: Marit

Yeah. Well, that's okay because there are still the titles above that within Deloitte, so I am not meant to be the end all and be-all, but I am here to help bring some of my niche knowledge about all sorts of random things into Deloitte so we can spread it out to the broader industry.

Host: Jon

Well, you and I know each other well. How about you tell the audience a little bit about yourself and where you're from?

Guest: Marit

So I am mostly from Virginia. Typically I've spent, except college, I think I've been within an hour of DC hour and a half of DC for most of my life. Originally a little further west. I have too many animals and don't do a very good job of gardening. So that's pretty much my life.

Host: Jon

Mart. How about you share a little bit about you at Deloitte and your organization and what you're doing there?

Guest: Marit

Oh, absolutely. So I am part of Deloitte's government and public services offering and what that means is we focus on the public sector, so government and public services. So whether that is your federal agency, your state, local, or even some nonprofit or quasi-governmental agencies, those all fall under our domain. In addition to helping support our clients, I also support some of our #FinOps work internally. The way Deloitte is organized means that while we are one firm, we have a whole bunch of separately siloed teams working on their things. So in addition to our global overlay that is traditionally considered central, there are some smaller sectors in there. So I help whoever asks for help whether it's plain on cost optimization, let's drive your bill down, you're going to be over budget for the year, or let's make sure as we start this new initiative that we have done. All of the kind of basics, whether it's your tagging strategy or understanding how to build a solid estimate. That's a thing I seem to be working on a lot recently is helping people figure out how to really, understand how much that thing is going to cost before they build the thing.

Host: Jon

What does #FinOps mean?

Guest: Marit

Oh god,

Guest: Marit

What is the meaning of life? What is the holy grail? The definition of #FinOps is basically about deriving value and getting the maximum value for the cloud. I think sometimes people go, well, #FinOps is financial operations, and yes and no, right? If you say it's just financial operations, then you miss all of the other components that have to be in place to have a successful #FinOps project, process, team, and culture. Because if you're just focusing on the finances, then what you're missing is, hey, did security come through and do their part? Did architecture make sure that this thing is going to meet our performance requirements? And those things have financial impacts, but they are not financial operational procedures. So coining the term #FinOps and then its relatives, cloud financial management, and all of these things I think put a very high amount of pressure on the word financial. And don't get me wrong, the finances are important. You have to pay that bill somehow some way, but it often leaves the impression that it's only the accountants and the finance people who are driving activities. And if that's the case, you're missing some of what needs to be considered, which is your technical implementation and reliability of your offering, whatever that may be.

Host: Jon

You're missing all the other components that come along with it. Yes, finance is key to it, but it's the team, it's the collaboration together to achieve those results. Why is #FinOps important to you though?

Guest: Marit

So when I started a big cloud bill was like $15,000 a month. That was huge, oh my god, they're spending a lot in the cloud amount and now that's cool, I'm glad you've started your cloud journey amount and when you're looking at those small amounts and understanding how they add up and whether it's in your budget, understanding how I call seven 11, my gateway drug, I walk in for one 99 cents big gulp and somehow leave with a $15 checkout, right? Well, the same thing can happen in your cloud. You can't fix your budget by just making edicts any more than you can fix your cloud bill by just making edicts. You have to set yourself up for success. And I think having watched all of those people for years, because it was probably only seven or eight years ago, six or seven years ago maybe, that people started to go, oh, this cloud thing is getting expensive, but watching all of the mistakes happen up until then and not being able to get people to care feels very much like watching myself make my own mistakes by walking into seven 11.

Guest: Marit

And then I think also then the people's retort at the end is the cloud isn't cheaper. Well, not the way you're doing it. And sometimes that's knowledge they didn't know. They didn't understand how to create a budget, how to estimate what their application was going to cost, how to architect in a cloud-native way, how to use microservices, all of that. Sometimes it's just laziness they knew, but that was harder. Lift and shift were easier. Sometimes there were external demands that said we have to get out of our data center immediately, and so they did. And now there are these choices and I think I just care so much whether it's personally or professionally, that money be spent wisely. And just saying I care by the way does not mean that I practice what I preach with my budget, but I do try and practice it with my cloud budget because those numbers are much larger and have a much bigger impact than my big gulp gone bad.

Host: Jon

I love the seven-even analogy, I'm going to have to use that. Or you might see a highlight of that coming out. Marit, let me ask you the difference between cloud financial management and #FinOps. Why do we have two terms? Do they both mean the same thing as one more than the other?

Guest: Marit

It depends on who you ask. If I hear CFM, I assume, and this may not be true in any particular organization, but if I hear CFM, I assume it is more about the optimization component. Are we buying all of our RIs and savings plans? Are we negotiating our biggest discounts? All of that kind of stuff. And then if I hear #FinOps, I'm assuming that it's a much broader cultural practice, but the reality is people often use those terms interchangeably, and so you have to spend some time talking to them to figure out exactly what their organization is doing or what their mindset is. Because I have heard #FinOps people who seem to just focus on rate optimization and tagging and cost reporting and not any of the other side of it. And I've heard c F M people, I do C F M not, and for them it's all-encompassing and I know people who don't call it either of the things, they just call it good stewardship. They're just doing what should be done and they don't give it a name. So the same thing maybe are they wildly different? Maybe it just depends on who you're asking and what you're talking about. So here I am again, Jon, not answering your questions.

Host: Jon

He could tell you work in the public sector and government stuff. I've answered your

Guest: Marit

Question. That's true of commercials though too. If there was one true answer, my friend, I would give it to you, but alas, if you talk to enough people, you find out there is no one true answer.

Host: Jon

That's all right. Merrit, how would you describe Deloitte's organizational #FinOps function? Where are you at within the process?

Guest: Marit

Oh wow. That's an interesting question because I am not on Deloitte's internal teams. I am in a client-facing role. I do support some of our internal clients, meaning a particular, if we're creating an asset that we want to sell, for example, as a SaaS product, I'm helping some of those teams, but for the most part, I don't support Deloitte Central it. Other folks do that #FinOps stuff. I don't have my cloud bill within Deloitte, so I don't know how they would manage my spent med. I would hope they'd look at my stuff and go, oh, she's good. We don't need to talk to her.

Host: Jon

Now if that is the case, if they look at yours and be like Mar, we've got to talk about your cloud bill. That's one of those you focus on all the others and you forget about yours.

Guest: Marit

Yeah, the cobbler's kids have no shoes kind of thing as possible, but for the most part, the internal clients I'm supporting have two focuses. One of which is, and it varies because as I said at the beginning, we're kind, even though we're one firm, we're one offering to the public internal to Deloitte. We have a lot of separate business units who do their them, not do their own thing, but in terms of their cloud, if they're building something that they hope to take to market as a SaaS product for example, they kind of do that on their own and if they pull me in, and so I kind of try and help them focus on kind two things. One, what is their budget that they've been given to ascend this year and how can we help them meet that budget but also give them things to consider as they go through their sprint planning and long-term planning?

Guest: Marit

So typically when you're working on something fast and you're trying to get it to market, there's a little bit of, I don't care how much it costs, I need to speed to market. And then there's the reality of the bills on the other side that say otherwise. And so it's finding that balance and sometimes finding proof points from elsewhere. So hey, for this particular application, if we ran it on Graviton, we could save 20%, but I also know this other team tried to run that same application on Graviton and ran into X issue. Can I help cross-pollinate information between these two independent views to try and save them some time in figuring out what can and cannot be done? Sometimes it's quite honestly, I just take something, one of them taught me, internalize it, and share that knowledge and it makes it interesting to consider my firm to be one of my clients.

Guest: Marit

So typically in the #FinOps world, you're either a consultant helping somebody else's company or you're helping your own company. What's interesting in my role is components of my company are treated by me just as if they were a state government or a federal agency. And so really what I'm trying to do is help them work within their constraints and take every lesson I've learned somewhere else so that they don't have to learn it as hard. Some of them insist on learning it the hard way, but most of them are happy to take those lessons learned from elsewhere.

Host: Jon

Now you're not part of the internal Deloitte IT team for the #FinOps, but you're helping customers like two customers implement #FinOps or work with it or just a portion of it.

Guest: Marit

It depends on what they've asked for help with. So we do maturity assessments, so some agency might come in and say, we think we're doing #FinOps, but we know we have some gaps. Can you come help us figure out where we are in our current state, and what our future roadmap looks like relative to our constraints, right? Because anyone commercial or public sector who's ever looked at a here is your ideal state of ops or honestly any framework, it doesn't even have to be #FinOps has gone haha to some component because you don't realize what restriction I have, whether that restriction is financial, whether it's headcount, whatever. What can we do? Sometimes that assessment is done before a very large migration effort. Are we ready from a #FinOps perspective to move out of data centers and into the cloud rather than doing cleanup after the fact?

Guest: Marit

Sometimes it's a, oh dear God, what happened to our bill? Please come help us reduce that bill and that takes a couple of forms. You go hit those really quick, easy wins, the low-hanging fruit, whatever it is, you go, I'm sorry, you're running how much on demand and you own zero RIS or savings plans. Let's knock some of those out. Let's go delete the E B S volumes that have been sitting unattached for three years. You try and hit those low-hanging fruit, but you also have to work them through getting stuff tack, right? And so what is their immediate need? Their immediate need is, oh dear God, let's driver bill down, but they have some longer-term needs so they don't end up back in that same situation. Other times we're just asked to come in and do kind of synopses a service, come in and do all of our reporting and do all of our tagging and let us know what things are right-sized and it's a regular ongoing engagement, so basically if it involves a cloud bill and they want to know something about it, they can bring us in at whatever level they want.

Host: Jon

Let's spin in a little bit and ask what are some of the mistakes that you might see immature companies make when implementing #FinOps.

Guest: Marit

The biggest mistake I see them make is saying our cloud bill is not that big. It's just a line item. It's fine. It's not even a line item on our bill. They're not wrong at that stage, but they're not prepared for the stage that's coming in six months or maybe if it's two years down the road, if you're really small in your cloud bill, let's say it's 15, 20 grand a month, but relative to your overall what you're spending on headcount, what you're spending on office, rent, and equipment, all of that, it doesn't register well, hopefully, your product is successful

Guest: Marit

And then that 15 grand a month becomes 150 grand becomes 300 grand and now no one is used to having any processor controls and you don't actually, you're at the point where you're ready to start, your accounting team is ready to start going, oh, well this is r and d, not production costs, and we get to handle those different from a tax perspective and they haven't set up anything to be able to do that. So not taking that time to think about if things go well, what kind of controls and reporting do we need in a couple of years so that you have them in place from the beginning.

Host: Jon

Would you say one of the biggest mistakes is not seeing or looking into the future and planning ahead of time or implementing #FinOps from the start or

Guest: Marit

I mean both because if you're looking ahead to the future and planning and implementing for what success will look like, that should include putting fops in at least components of fops at the start because otherwise you're just all freewheeling it and hoping the angel investor comes or the series C funding or series A for that matter. And it's hard because nobody can predict the future, especially if you're truly a startup and you're trying to bootstrap your way, just speed. I got to get my first customer, I got to get my first investor, I got to get out the door, but just spending an hour going, all right, let's say I get 20 customers, what things will I wish I'd put in place on day one can save a whole lot of heartache and as you get to 20 customers, stop and think, all right, what if I get to 200? What controls do I need to put in place now to make that feasible when I get there? Otherwise, try to clean up when you have 2000 customers, and that goes for your architecture too, not just your spending, right? Are you on the right? Are you on RDS or Redshift or should you move to Athena, right? All of these questions I think too often startups wait until they've dug themself into an immense amount of tech debt and outrageously high cloud bills before they go back and reconsider

Host: Jon

Spend the hour now or the hour daily now and instead of spending months down the road trying to clean up and trying to implement something, when you can kind of do it from the beginning and on a smaller scale, but you're at least aware of your growth and where you potentially could go,

Guest: Marit

It doesn't even have to be an hour daily, honestly, when you're small enough, spend three hours on day one, consider it again for an hour at month one, and then an hour each month of am I supporting myself in the way that will be sustainable from controls and financials and reporting aspect. If general p s a, if you have workloads in your a w s management account and you're a small company to this, please get them out now. Put nothing else in your management account, just do your future. Everybody. Huge favor with that because those are the kinds of things that I would see because people didn't spend an hour of planning. How's it going to work when I have 47 engineers all with access to your management account?

Host: Jon

Yeah, very true. When you're trying to go quick starting up, you're just like everybody accessing one account in the organization, we talked about immature #FinOps and some of the mistakes that they're making, but do you see even mature #FinOps companies are implementing making mistakes and what are they and what do you suggest?

Guest: Marit

The biggest mistake I see is to set it and forget it. Very similar honestly to startup. It's just how it got there is different. So under set it and forget it, we have our SOP, we have our controls, we have our tagging, we're done, things change. Are you paying attention to them? Are you looking at things at the granularity you need? Are you ready for your next shift? Whether it's a business increase or a business decrease, something we all have to consider these days and people just love a set it and forget it. S o p and anyone who's ever found an SOPthat was so outdated that you don't even recognize the names of the people in the document, that is the biggest mistake I see folks make. Steven old when he did this was people not continuing to improve and that not continuing to improve is a variation on the set it and forget it mentality,

Host: Jon

They set it and forget it. How often do we do that not only at work but in our personal lives and not go back and reevaluate how we can improve overall and continuously improve? You said to spend three hours the first week and then next month spend an hour as long as you're spending the time or investing into it, you'll continuously improve on things.

Guest: Marit

I mean if any of you are personal finance nerds and go to the subreddit on personal finance periodically, and when I say periodically, probably every week or so somebody joins that because they just realized after years that they had never actually invested their 401K money or their IRA money and it was just sitting in the initial money market account rather than properly invested and they had set it to set it and forget it and hadn't even properly set it. So you never know how far off your S or P is if you're not constantly reevaluating it.

Host: Jon

I'll be right back.

Guest: Marit

Go check that

Host: Jon

Fidelity. Now let's talk a little bit more about your #FinOps journey. What were you doing before joining Deloitte?

Guest: Marit

Most immediately before joining Deloitte, I worked at Ingram Micro where I created and then ran what we called the IAS administration team. And what that meant was I helped about 220 partners globally create, manage, and run their AWS resell business. Offered some support for Azure as well, but I would say 95% of it was AWS and what that meant was I did not focus on their go-to-market, right? Go-to-market was their problem. What I helped them with was understanding a w s programs under channel, how to understand your AWS bills so that you could appropriately bill your end client, and then also how to save money, right? One of the primary reasons to go through a channel or managed services provider is to have them take over the burden of running your cloud environment. So I did a lot of training on how to read your A W SS bill so that you knew what you were being charged, much less how to charge your client, but then understanding what to go look for when the bill was starting to get out of control as well as a lot more of those operational things along the organizational alignment stakeholder engagement area.

Guest: Marit

It looks a little different as a managed service provider, but it's just as critical

Host: Jon

Bringing awareness to their cloud costs Marit. How did you get started within #FinOps?

Guest: Marit

So I guess it depends on what you mean by started and #FinOps, but 12

Host: Jon

I've asked cloud financial management,

Guest: Marit

So it's been about 12 years now since I handled my first AWS deal and at the time there were no blogs and there was no repost and there were no Jon Myer podcasts or the ops guys podcast. None of those things existed, so I had to figure out the billing on my own and then kind of bit by bit, I went from one account to three accounts to five accounts learning a little bit each time. This was for the OG AWS people. This was back in the day of light medium and heavy RIs. And so partial upfront just seems so easy in comparison to those things. And so just kind of a little bit by a little bit it grew. When I left there, I ended up at Cloud Checker where I was on their product team and I had a hybrid role in our customer success as well as our sales engineering team in addition to helping build products. So I had a ton of visibility into people's cloud cost problems from teeny tiny startups to large-scale Fortune 100 enterprises, including some who were cloud native and some who had been companies for a hundred years and everything in between before I went to Ingram and now Deloitte,

Host: Jon

As part of your current role as a specialist master, what are some of the things that you're responsible for or that you're handling specifically for customers? What does the day-to-day look like for you?

Guest: Marit

I don't have a day-to-day, and I say that a little bit as a joke but a little bit because it's true. I support multiple clients, I support folks internally. I do a ton of internal training and mentorship and things like that. So for client-based engagements, I do a lot of asking them questions about what their specific needs are because no two, I could pick states right next to each other agencies that sit on the same street in DC and they have very different needs, they have different restrictions, they have different internal politics. So figuring out exactly what their needs are and their goals are to move forward with their #FinOps practice then. So it's a lot of just conversations and asking them questions and then other times it's sitting in a meeting discussing how to get the maximum benefit in our next P P A renegotiation. So no two days are the same and no month contains a single pattern other than I do work at a consulting firm. So PowerPoint, PowerPoint is consistent through it all, PowerPoint and Excel actually, because Excel and #FinOps as well as Excel and consulting are inseparable.

Host: Jon

So you're enjoying those spreadsheets.

Guest: Marit

I'll take spreadsheets over PowerPoint any day.

Host: Jon

I actually will too. I like Excel, don't get me wrong or anything like that. What are some of the biggest challenges that you're facing right now or your customers might be facing?

Guest: Marit

I think the biggest problem my external clients are facing is figuring out how to insert the needs of #FinOps into an existing process. So agencies, again, federal, state, and local, have a lot of processes in them. Most of it's given has roots in regulation and so then in comes this new thing, oh God, we got to put more controls in. How do you give me not another workflow? How many forms do I fill out? I can't fill out any more forms, I can't approve any more forms. So how can we get some of the responsibilities that need to be picked up if you're going to do #FinOps, right? And to do #FinOps rights means you're doing your cloud. So whether you call it CFM or #FinOps or whatever, if you're doing your cloud, how do you get those things in place without burdening people with more forms?

Guest: Marit

So sometimes that's going back to a form at kind of project ideation and just putting in a, do you have an estimate for this? Do you have tag keys for these values? Maybe that's where it begins and that's why I can't give one solution to all of my clients because boy, if I could just drop in and be like, here's your solution, pop out, all cloud waste would be gone, right? Instead, you have to find out how you can slide it in a way that will be effective without creating more burden than the value you're trying to get out of it.

Host: Jon

That is very key because of what I see and what I hear with #FinOps and implementing it and those who don't have it yet, or it's like how do I get this into my company and not add more burden to my teams of another process or things that have to go into place and another review and another meeting without be like, alright, is it worth the value of implementing it versus my cloud costs at this period in this time? How do you juggle them?

Guest: Marit

And it's a challenge and I think it's looking at your existing process and finding out, can we rephrase this question so that it answers multiple things? Can we add another question to an already existing form? Can we do training so that all of our architects are aware that Graviton might save us 20% if compatible and what that testing would need to look like before they proceed? Finding what weakness you need to address the most given your organization's thing and finding a different way to solve the problem versus another form in another meeting. Sometimes, sorry, that meeting is needed, but can you mitigate that need and make it as valuable as possible so that it becomes easy for folks to action?

Host: Jon

Well, let's talk about the automation aspect of getting this information. Are you using AI, I know AI is a big term right now and I'm just talking about some automation and AI integrated to complete certain tasks, or how do you see it affecting

Guest: Marit

Personally not using much automation or AI unless some Excel macros count. So automation

Host: Jon

That does, that's automation. Oh my God, that brings back memories from 97,

Guest: Marit

Right? In part, because most things that I'm working with are, I think you have to have a certain amount of maturity for automation to be valuable. If I had let loose automation on one of my client's accounts in January, we would've been massively over-provisioned on our eyes and savings plans because compute costs have dropped by 50% in the last five months. A few other places. I get very nervous when people say, oh, we're going to go fix your Terraform script to use GP three instead of GP two. And I'm like, oh, don't get me wrong. I'm going to be sitting there telling people to go configure this to change the GP three, but I need them to go back and change their, not just their base template, but I need them to change whatever workflow created that base template so that when they create the template for application number seven, it doesn't also say GP two and until you have enough rigor in your #FinOps practice that automation doesn't just create stack drift and then have to redeploy and redeploy and redeploy every time you spin up something new. It's a hard sell, I think for fairly well-established, and I don't think they have to be run everywhere, but I think they have to be reasonably functioning, very stable in their walk, like a five-year-old's walk, not a toddler's walk. It can't be blown over by a stiff one. I think once you've reached that level, automation becomes a lot more sustainable. When I think of babies and toddlers with automation, it's a little bit like what kind of mess are they going to get into with that Sharpie on the wall?

Host: Jon

I know this next question is probably, I'm hoping we have enough time in this podcast for is going to open up a bunch of stuff, but we were talking about it earlier. You mentioned it a couple of times in tagging. What is the importance or how important do you feel at tagging any environment? I don't care. Even internal tagging is for #FinOps in general,

Guest: Marit

Incredibly important. If you want to reach a fast walk or run, you're tagging not only can tell you cool cost stuff, and help you do your KPIs and your unit economics, but tags can also help you run some scripted automation of turn down these instances at 7:00 PM every weeknight and turn them back on at 7:00 AM. You can't do that without a tag because your lambda description would need something to go identify that machine with unless you're going to create it with individual instance IDs, which is not scalable, and then turn it off all weekend. So some of it is for that, you should be tagging for security, tagging for automation, tagging for cost. When I was talking about the things as you're setting out the three hours the first month and then that kind of month is alright, once we reach this phase, do I need to start separating the costs of my dev versus my prod because now I have clients and some of this is a cost of goods sold and not an expense. And you need to start understanding where those true ideals are. You have them in separate accounts or separate subscriptions, but even within that understanding who stood up for what purpose can help you figure out what's generating your costs. My one piece of advice is for the love of God, please, I beg everyone, I'm going to stay real hard into the camera right now. Do not ever put a tag key of your password and a tag value of your password because that is a thing I have seen in the CUR. So please,

Host: Jon

Seriously, wait, wait, wait. You have seriously seen those tags in the CUR?

Guest: Marit

Yes. I have a hundred percent seen, and I'm going to restate this again, I need everyone to understand this. At no point in time should you have a tag of admin, password, admin, p wd, any of that, anything resembling that, and an actual password in your tag value. And so when I discovered this, I posted this on Twitter back before that just completely tanked and somebody said they didn't understand why this was a problem, they said, but they didn't realize. What they did not realize was that the cost and usage report gets pulled into third-party tools that other people can see like, well, it's in my account, I'm the only one with access to it. And they meant within their dev account within a broader organization. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but see that tag key, if somebody just hit activate all on the cost allocation tags now is writing to the cost and usage report and that cost and usage report can be put into a third party tool that then I had access to. Now I did not have access to that member account, but if I were a person with nefarious intent, I'm sure I could probably find my way in and I now had the password to their instant no. So please again, tag the things, just do not tag them with the admin password. I'm begging you,

Host: Jon

Marit, that's some sound advice. I have never come across it, but I'm sure there are some good stories around it. How important is tagging for accurate reporting though

Guest: Marit

For accurate cost reporting? Because there's a whole bunch of reporting you can do via tag, but for accurate cost reporting, well, it depends on the granularity of the cost reporting you need. If I just need to know what my total cloud spend is, it doesn't matter whether you tag it. If you need to start understanding how much test dev staging costs you relative to prod if you need to start understanding how much business unit A costs you relative to business unit B, those things, you need more tagging if you're trying to understand which of your services can be migrated to newer instances. Honestly, tagging helps there too. There are certain software that only is supported if you're running on an M four large, the fact that we're on M six is an M seven is irrelevant because that software is only supported on M four large, right? A tag can save me from repeating that recommendation to you next month. I can just go, oh yeah, this one will not be upgraded until the third-party vendor updates their stuff. So tagging is always important, but cost reporting, are you looking to do cost recommendations or total spend? And what those tags are might be a little different, but still important.

Host: Jon

There's that question of tagging one account that's solely meant for me as a developer, and do I tag it or not?

Guest: Marit

And I think that it goes a bunch of different ways. The small organization, it's really easy to be, oh, account 3, 9 4, but at a larger organization, first of all, there are 15 Jons and which team does Jon,

Host: Jon

I haven't 15 a million,

Guest: Marit

But also which team does Jon belong to? Because as you get bigger how many places that money could fit and where it belongs, also your personal development account might have used sandboxing things for different work streams that have different financial handling rules. So how big is your organization, and how granular is there a chargeback? All of those things are components. A lot of reporting now can be done by a tag. You can filter on the tag, just show me things that include the filter prod, for example, or the tag key of prod, but not everything can, right? So if you're going through a compute optimizer and you're just pulling a list, it only includes account IDs. So sometimes there is a little bit of mix and match that has to happen anyway, but you can still filter down and drive things. So again, it comes back to how big is your organization, and what are their needs. I think getting in the habit of tagging is pretty solid, but I understand why if it is dedicated per account, it doesn't always happen.

Host: Jon

Mari, it's time to wrap things up with a couple of fun questions for you and then our final

Guest: Marit

Question. Oh, no fun.

Host: Jon

Yeah. Well, isn't that what the F stands for?

Guest: Marit

Yeah, absolutely

Host: Jon

Fun in operation. No, Mar, here's my first question for you. If you didn't have to be here right now, and I'm not talking about the podcast because you have to be, no, I'm just kidding. If you didn't have to be at Deloitte right now, where would you be and why?

Guest: Marit

Oh, am I employed but not doing this? Or am I independently wealthy and I get to run my own life?

Host: Jon

Let's go independently wealthy.

Guest: Marit

If I'm independently wealthy, I'm probably spending a fair chunk of the day riding horses and the rest of the time volunteering for things to prevent homelessness, particularly in teens.

Host: Jon

Well, I wish you luck on winning the lottery or being wealthy to go ahead and forward with both of those, like the second one. That's the very first time I've heard that

Guest: Marit

It's huge, if you can prevent homelessness in your late teens and early twenties, it prevents lifelong homelessness. The intervention rate at that age is very successful, more successful than if you start later.

Host: Jon

Mayor, is there any information later on you can provide me and I'll put that in the description then?

Guest: Marit

Absolutely.

Host: Jon

Alright, I'd like to share that. I'm going to turn to our last question. And Marra, do you remember what an iPod is?

Guest: Marit

I do.

Host: Jon

Okay. Sometimes I have to ask my guests, they're like, what is that? Do you have music on your phone? We didn't have phones back then. There was a device where music and you could only cram 256 songs or something. Alright, imagine having an iPod, the OG of it all, and you're on an island, you have music on this. What music?

Guest: Marit

It has to be music.

Host: Jon

Well, wait, could we put other stuff on it? Audiobooks. Could you put

Guest: Marit

Audio? Yeah, audiobooks. I think audiobooks could go there. It was before the podcast revolution, so audio audiobooksrobably there. I think I'd have, it was 250 songs, so I think I'd have an audiobook with a really good narrator and then I'd probably do a mix of songs that are sing-along, fun, high energy. Even if you don't know all of the lyrics, somehow you sing along to it. Type of music just to bring up the energy. When it's time to get moving,

Host: Jon

I'm going to put you on the spot. Do you have one song in particular in mind that sticks in your head?

Guest: Marit

So the songs that come to mind are probably not the songs I would choose first, but they're the ones that pop to mind first, which are like the, Hey Mickey, you're so fine. Or the 8 6 7 5 3 0 9 song, right? Those songs that even if you don't know all the lyrics, come on, and you have to sing along to them. YMCA A is another one. But I'm thinking also too, a lot of the nineties alt and pop type of stuff that was of my era, like my high school, college, and just beyond era, that little Eminem in there to mix it up just to get the energy and start going around.

Host: Jon

Right now, is anybody listening? I hope one of these songs got stuck in your head for the remainder of the day.

Guest: Marit

If your brain isn't going, Hey Mickey, you're so fine. You're much younger than Jon and I are

Host: Jon

Doing it. When you said that, I thought there was a movie, bring it on, and at the end of it they did that. Hey Mickey, you're so fine. You're so fine. And it a very catchy, it gets your energy up. Mario, my last question for you, who are some of the most influential practitioners in #FinOps?

Guest: Marit

So right now, and of course I'm blanking on his name, he is Bradwell out of the UK. He is doing a savings for Ukraine, #FinOps for Ukraine initiative, a waste challenge where he's trying to get organizations to do a #FinOps push and donate a percentage of their savings to Ukraine.

Host: Jon

I'll find his name, I'll post it. I'll try to get it on the screen or something. We'll share it with everybody.

Guest: Marit

Yeah, so absolutely it'll come

Host: Jon

To you after we click stop recording. A

Guest: Marit

Hundred percent. As soon as we hit stop recording. I looked up his name last night to have it on top of my mind to make sure I had his company and everything right. And Frank Trois of Strategic Blue is somebody that every time I talk to him, I adore him, but I almost develop an inferiority complex. Like I'll never be that smart. I'll just never be that smart and being able to explain it so clearly, he's phenomenal. I love talking to Steven Old who I met through Frank. There are a few other folks that I have enjoyed meeting, but I haven't had a chance to talk to them about #FinOps specifically. But I met them because of #FinOps, and this is Deanna of Smarsh and Amy, she was with Under Armour, but she's just changed roles. Ashby, just some phenomenal people that you can tell they are very, very good at what they do. I just haven't had much of a chance. We tend to talk about women in the workplace more than we talk about Synapse, honestly, when I'm talking to 'em. But there's just amazing, I have a colleague, Amanda Dalton, who's also fabulous and, we have similar experiences, but wildly different experiences, and so it's been great to learn from folks like that. So honestly, almost anyone I talk to in #FinOps, I learned something from, because we've all had different lessons. Learned the hard way.

Host: Jon

Oh, Marra, that was an awesome list of #FinOps practitioners that are out there. Don't worry everybody. We're going to add them to the description. We're going to reach out and try to get them on a future podcast. Now it's time to wrap things up for our faces in Enos podcast. Everyone, Merrit Hughes, a specialist master at Deloitte Merritt, thank you so much for joining me.

Guest: Marit

Thank you for having me, Jon. It's been wonderful. As always,

Host: Jon

Everybody, this has been another awesome episode and discussion around faces and fins, powered by our good friends at Prosper Apps. Be sure to hit that, like subscribe notify, and follow that Prosper op blog. Until next time.