Let's connect with Thomas Kline of Stark & Stark. Please leave your comments and questions for Thomas below. If you are interested in being featured in a member spotlight, please email customerreference@8x8.com.
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Growing up, did you know technology would be your career choice?
I wanted to be a doctor, right up until I was 12 years old. When I was 12, my father took me to a computer show for the first time. We had bought a PC from a BJs Wholesale Club and the sound card didn't work. We couldn't get support for it, and we were banging our heads against the wall. So we went to this computer show and bought a new sound card. He and I went through it together and figured out how to replace it. Going through that exercise turned me on to the internal workings of computer hardware. I wanted to know more about it. I wanted to try to figure out how it all works and try to make it run faster, so I took it completely apart. My dad's jaw dropped, but I didn't break it. I ended up putting it back together-and it worked. I think it shocked him. It definitely shocked me! Ever since then, I've just been really interested in hardware and software.
Tell us about your post high school adventures.
When it came time for college, I had to make a decision: was I going on a pure tech track or was I going to do something else? I love the way businesses operate and I wanted to know more about that, so I pursued a business administration degree in Information Systems at Rider University, and later, earned an MBA from Rider. People and technology are both interesting to me. For me, it was the best decision not to pursue a formal technical degree. Today, I manage a staff of seven. I love being able to teach, impart experiences, and having that business and leadership acumen in addition to being hands-on with technology.
What was your first job after college?
Coming out of college, my first real tech job was a systems engineer for a consulting company out of Pennington, New Jersey. I had 15 different clients all over the state. I was constantly running to the next project. The job gave me exposure to a lot of different industries-pharmaceutical, legal, accounting, and other professional services. I got to see how different organizations work, and I got to play with a lot of new technology. It was trial by fire-stressful but fun.
What was your experience joining Stark & Stark?
When I joined Stark & Stark in 2014, I walked into a "lift and shift" technology opportunity. Morale was low with the IT department. Our technology stack wasn't current. I got commitment from management to spend money on technology. In terms of the staff, I wanted to see what they could do. They had never had Active Directory or a Microsoft environment, and I hadn't built one from scratch in years. We could have hired consultants to do it, but I decided we would build it together. It took longer for us to do it ourselves, but in the end, the team understood it because they built it. Today, we're almost all in the cloud, and we're continuing to invest and improve by following a zero-trust model. I am more hands-off than I've ever been in my career, and it's great because I get to focus on things like security audits and working with vendors to advance our partnership and I don't have to worry about the day-to-day operations because my team is just phenomenal. That's a really good feeling. And they know that if they are really struggling, they can come into my office, ask me a question, and I'm going to help them. Developing that level of trust and respect is really important and learned over a period of many years.
What advice would you give to someone who's starting out their career in technology?
As you're going through high school, and whatever comes after, get exposed to many different areas of technology. Find out what you're truly passionate about, and specialize. You can build your entire career doing nothing but security, for example, and it will be a really exciting, varied career. You'll see a lot of different things and play with a lot of different technologies, just within that realm. I think you're seeing more and more that technology leadership plays a very critical role in how organizations stay competitive, and continue to reinvent themselves. It's becoming one of the most powerful and influential areas of an organization to be in.
How is your firm incorporating AI into your business?
At our firm, we formed a committee to discuss what AI is going to mean to us, what questions we want to ask or have answered, and what it will be used for. We adopted a policy to give people guidelines about responsible use of AI. We've been training folks on that and we're going to continue those discussions and that journey on an ongoing basis as part of our annual training. In a law firm environment, our advice needs to be honest, accurate, and complete. You certainly can't get that from the first draft generated by a GPT… even one using a legal-specific large language model. Generative AI, including summarization and drafting, are things we're absolutely interested in and committed to finding tools that increase efficiency, accuracy, completeness and productivity. We're starting to see more shifts within the legal industry resulting from technologies like AI, technologies that could disrupt that classic 1:1 relationship between attorney and staff for example. An attorney might need a letter drafted and instead of going to their assigned, legal assistant within their practice group, it'll go into a centralized resource ticketing system instead. AI could probably assist with centralized resource pooling by evaluating work allocations so that we know no one staff member is getting overworked or underutilized. AI has so much potential beyond generative-AI to introduce more efficiency to a firm.
On a personal note, what are your hobbies?
My kids are really into scouting; I have two cub scouts and one in Scouts BSA, and that takes up a lot of our time. We love supporting them as they develop all sorts of skills that I certainly never did when I was a kid. My oldest just went up in a Cessna plane and logged his first hour of flight time. So it's really cool to see the different things they get exposed to and to see them succeed in it. I'm a big movie fan, I love Star Wars. I collected comics when I was a kid. I love retro video games and have 10 arcade games in my basement, including Streetfighter, Pacman, and a virtual pinball machine. It's where I go to decompress. My kids are on the other side of the room playing their Nintendo Switch but I'll take a joystick and button- mashing over a controller any day.
What are the big trends you kind of anticipate next in technology?
Cybersecurity will continue to be big and expansive and will start including privacy. It's a matter of when, not if, we get federally-adopted privacy legislation, similar to GDPR in Europe, and that will send shockwaves through organizations in the US, leading to whole sets of new tools and technologies to handle privacy requests appropriately.
Putting on my hardware hat, quantum computing has been out of the reach for the typical consumer and business, but I think that's going to be the next generational leap in terms of hardware performance. When you pair that with AI models, we're going to be able to automate more processes and do things at speeds we never thought were possible.
8x8: Would you recommend 8x8 to companies looking for cloud communications?
We evaluated multiple UCaaS cloud telephony providers. We looked at all the major players that you would expect. 8x8 was the only one that was a telephony-first solution, and that's really what we were looking for. When we migrated away from our old Avaya system, we wanted to provide feature parity with what we could get out of our traditional phone system. But we also wanted more features and more functionality. If we were going to change a call route or a process or a call feature, we wanted it to be an improvement or an enhancement, not a workaround. We really didn't want to have to accept or deal with limitations within the system. That's what really stood out for us about 8x8-it had all of the telephony features we needed, as well as improvements and enhancements that our users just really love.