The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network: Recent Episodes
EPAM Continuum
EPAM Continuum podcasts feature interviews with people practicing innovation in various forms, digging into their ability to deliver results. Repeatedly.
— finally giving organizations the ability to capture real field data and activate it in an intelligent ecosystem. That's the version of CRM that justifies the investment. That's also the version most life sciences companies haven't built… yet.Host: Jonathan Swersey Engineer: Kyp PilalasProducer: Gabrielle SemonExecutive Producer: Ken Gordon
Remember Shadow IT? This has long been an issue in big organizations, and in the era of generative AI — with its powerful, easy-to-operate, democratically available tools — the challenges have scaled, as one says in the vernacular. One person who has successfully met these challenges is Eric Pace, Head of AI at Cox Communications, who created an interesting and effective citizen developer program at his organization. He brings news of this to The Resonance Test in a conversation with Elaina Shekhter, EPAM’s Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer.Shekhter begins by asking about the citizen developer model around the development and deployment of agents in the enterprise. One of the keys to unlocking value in any ecosystem is through adoption,” says Pace. But adoption, in this case, “hinges on one very important thing, and that's AI literacy.”To accomplish this, Pace and his team gave their colleagues hands-on experience with the tools and capabilities that AI provides. They had access, guardrails, guidelines and references to follow.Pace notes that he had two paths: (1) “We could either tell them everything is locked down and you can't do any of it” or (2) tell colleagues, “You can play in this open playground and just follow our rules and do all the things you want to go do.” He chose the second option, and it turns out, his people are “very happy in the playground with the fence around it, that we built for them, because it's got all the tools and toys that they need.”All of which is great… but what does it mean for the business? “All the executives read are these articles about the trillion dollars that's being spent and the zero impact to the bottom line,” says Pace, adding that CFOs are mostly saying, “Stop wasting all our money.”Pace correctly says that there is “no instant gratification” involved here. “The notion that I can ask a very complex question and instantly get a very complex answer sets the perception that I can just go implement at scale enterprise-grade capabilities and get value out of them tomorrow.”Shekhter and Pace agree that this isn’t how things work, especially, says Pace, “When you take into account the change management adoption and process curves that you've got to crawl through to see the value come to fruition.”Pace reports the projects his citizen developers have created “have absolute potential to go drive the value that we've prescribed as possible in a very near future.”Listen, and improve your own organization’s journey. Host: Alison KotinEngineer: Kyp PilalasProducer: Ken Gordon
I think a lot of people breathed a sigh of relief. There is a lot of complexity in what's being proposed. I don't think it was a complete surprise if you look at what's happened with other regulations,” says Nicholls.Owers follows this up with a question on how the differences between the UK and European versions – a divergent approach to regulation – are tangibly impacting clients. Nicholls responds, “if you're in a two-tier, two-speed environment where you've got to satisfy regulators in the EU and regulators in the UK, and those regulators become increasingly divergent no longer aligned, you’re going to need more complex systems, data and processes to deal with two environments.”With this, the conversation shifts into how organizations can deal with these complex systems, touching on everything from technology and AI to the shortage of talent within the industry that’s both tech-savvy and versed in regulatory compliance. Ultimately, however, our speakers leave the conversation on a positive note, confident that today’s sprint toward AI can help organizations to even the odds in the great regulatory compliance race. As Giammarino says: “This is a time for organizations to put in robust proofs of concept and begin scaling so they can turn the rulebook into a runbook.” Listen carefully, and watch out for galloping insights! Host: Chris Tapley Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Scott MacAllister Executive Producer: Ken Gordon
When it comes to the topic of drug discovery and development, scientists are busy furrowing their lab-goggled brows trying to understand what’s real and what’s hype when it comes to the power and potential of AI. This Resonance Test conversation perfectly dramatizes the situation. In this episode, Emma Eng, VP of Global Data & AI, Development at Novo Nordisk, and Chris Waller, EPAM’s VP of Scientific Informatics Consulting and Chief Scientist in Life Sciences, provide a candid view of drug development in the AI era. “We're standing on a revolution,” says Eng, reminding us that “we've done it so many other times” with the birth of the computer and the birth of the internet. It’s prudent, she cautions, not to rush to judgement guided by either zealots or skeptics.Waller says, of the articles about AI and leadership in Harvard Business Review, one could do “a search and replace ‘AI’ with any other technological change that's happened in the last 30 years. It's the same kind of trend and processes and characteristics that you need in your leadership to implement the technology appropriately to get the outcomes that you're looking for.” Which means, for pharma, much uncertainty and much experimentation. “I think experimentation is good,” says Eng, who then adds that we need to always keep track of what is it that we're experimenting on. She says that the word “experimentation” can “sound very fluid” but in fact, “It's a very structured process. You set up some very clear objectives and you either prove or don't prove those objectives.”Waller references the various revolutions (throughput screening, combinational chemistry, data, and analytics revolutions) that pharma has seen and says: “We've all held out hope for each and every one of these revolutions that the drug discovery process is going to be shrunk by 50% and cost half as much. And every time we turn around, it's still 12 to 15 years, $1.5 to $2 billion.”Will AI make the big difference, finally?“Maybe we need to be revolutionized as an industry,” she says. “It can be hard to make much of a difference as long as there are few big players.” Just a few big players, she says, is “the nature of pharma.”Of course, our scientists are measured in their assessments about industry change. After all, as Waller says, the systems involved—the human body, the regulatory environment, the commercial ecosystems—are all “super-complicated.”Eng notes that an important side-effect around the AI hype is corporate interest in data. “Now it's much easier to put that topic on the table saying, ‘If you want to do AI, you need to take care of your data and you need to treat it like an asset.’”Listen on as they test topics such as regional and regulatory challenges in AI adoption, change management, and future tech and long-term impact (watch out for quantum, everyone!). In the end, Eng returns to the idea of revolutions. “You think you want so much change in the beginning which you don't get because it takes time,” says Eng. This makes us underestimate what will happen later. Having such a farseeing mindset is significant, she says, because “these technology shifts will have a large impact on the long term.”Host: Alison KotinEngineer: Kyp PilalasProducer: Ken Gordon
“In French, we say when it’s raining at a wedding, it will be a beautiful marriage leading to a happy life,” says Bank Syz COO, Boris Chave. Reflecting on an announcement made on stage in 2023 alongside EPAM’s now-CEO Balazs Fejes during an afternoon storm in Geneva, Chave adds: “I think this rainy event was the beginning of a successful project and a happy partnership between Syz and EPAM.” Swiss banks have a well-known reputation for being protective of customer data, and Bank Syz is no exception. For years, the bank relied on on-prem servers and top-shelf security solutions to protect its customer data. However, the cost of those solutions was rising sharply, which led Chave to wonder if there existed a better solution. “The challenge with our setup was that even though we had these best-in-breed technology solutions, the ongoing investments we needed to make to protect our data just weren’t sustainable. I had to ask myself, should we continue down this path with its huge impact on P&L? Not to mention I wasn’t comfortable with the complexity of our systems.” Fast forward to June of 2025, and EPAM has just finished helping Bank Syz migrate all its IT infrastructure to cloud-based systems, no small feat. As Fejes points out, “You got new notebooks, new applications, you migrated everything to the cloud. You basically built, de facto, a brand-new bank.” As Chave notes, not only did EPAM help Syz navigate the cloud migration, but we did so with minimal impact on operations. “So many aspects of this project have been a huge success. We delivered on time and on budget without any outages for customers or employees.”The move to the cloud came at a rather fortuitous time. Fejes says: “When you and I met on that stage in 2023, nobody was really talking about AI yet. But now you’re probably finding yourself in a very privileged situation because some of your competitors might still need to work on what I would call the foundational elements of their infrastructure, whereas you’re in a situation where you can take advantage of the capabilities of the cloud.” Says Chave: “The foundation we have now will give us access to some of the best AI technology without having to make huge investments in infrastructure just to deliver something. We can try out new tools and pivot quickly.”Beyond enabling new and surprising technologies, the move to the cloud also had another major impact on Bank Syz: a reduction in complexity. What was previously 140 applications working together to protect the bank’s data has been reduced to seven on the cloud system. “So many people are underestimating the impact of complexity in terms of environment stability and cost. Program simplification is probably one of the best ways to achieve cost-efficient operations,” says Fejes.It might seem counterintuitive that such a complex transformation could result in such simplicity, but that’s exactly how this project played out. Now, with the stage set, let’s raise the curtain on this episode. Host: Michael Nicholls Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Scott MacAllister Executive Producer: Ken Gordon
AI is not as new as we think, says Gary Rivlin, author of AI Valley: Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion-Dollar Race to Cash in on Artificial Intelligence. As our non-artificial guest on The Resonance Test, Rivlin tells host Barry Briggs that back in the 1950s, it was thought that AI was always right around the corner. There would be a gathering of technologists who said: “Give us 10 years and we'll have this thing largely solved.” Which meant, says Rivlin: “AI was ‘a decade away’ for about 70 years.”Rivlin notes that recommendation engines and Google Translate have been operating for a while. “Google Translate has been around since 2015. That's AI, but no one really thinks of it as AI.” However, when ChatGPT strutted onto the scene, it was something else. Rivlin says: “We were talking to it. Suddenly: AI that you could converse with. It's a whole different beast.”The builders of that beast are his topic in AI Valley. Rivlin, who was a reporter for WIRED in the dot-com days, returns to his old beat to document the onset of the recent, fast-blooming AI spring. He and Briggs, a former CTO at Microsoft IT, bring years of history into the conversation to offer an assessment at this moment of peak AI in Silicon Valley. They talk, for instance, of Reid Hoffman. Briggs says, “He’s the exception to the rule of nice guys finish last.” Rivlin zings back, calling Hoffman: “A billionaire you can root for” and adding “this lonely kid who wanted friends created LinkedIn, which connects the world.”Together they remember the dot-com days of irrational exuberance, getting-rich-by-selling-dog-food-online. “The problem was we tend to overestimate the short-term impact of a technology and underestimate the long term,” says Rivlin, adding we’re seeing a similar sort of thinking with AI today. The pair reflect on how people used to joke about autocomplete. “I should have started thinking, ‘this could turn into sentences, this could turn into paragraphs, this could turn into dialogue,’” says Briggs.Rivlin notes that agents aren’t “trustworthy” yet. He says that if an agent is going to “make material decisions, it really needs to be trustworthy.” In two, five, 10 years from now, “AI agents are going to be central to the work life of many, maybe perhaps most of us.”We trust that you’ll be informed and entertained by this episode. Click on!Host: Alison KotinEngineer: Kyp PilalasProducer: Ken Gordon
In the age of AI, there’s no going it alone. Partnership is now an absolute necessity. This conversation between Colleen Kapase, VP of Channels and Partner Programs at Google Cloud, and Elaina Shekhter, EPAM’s Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer, demonstrates the value of partnership done right. Their back-and-forth embodies the enduring partnership, and unshakable trust, that Goole Cloud and EPAM have built over the years. Kapase notes that the conversations she's had with partners were often about modernizing cloud infrastructure rather than more nuanced AI discussions. No more! “It's moved beyond a CIO conversation to a product conversation, to a CMO conversation.” Google and their partners are asking: “What are you doing to leverage AI to advance our products or offerings or processes and customer experience?”This kind of working is, Kapase says, an opportunity to “grow, grow, grow, grow” that can deeply impact their partners’ customer experience and product development.Shekhter says that lately there has been much restructuring of the partner ecosystem and then asks bluntly: What is partnership for?“Just delighting the customer,” says Kapase. “I don't know if it gets any more complicated than that.”Complicating things somewhat, Shekhter wonders if her interlocutor has advice on how partnership can be customer-centric in AI-native transformation work.“It can sound basic, but communication is so important,” says Kapase. “It is really the basis of any great partnership… Strong communication just can make you better together.”Better together, indeed. So, for those who are in or want to join the Google Cloud crowd, or care about partnerships more generally, listen up! Much here to learn about partner-driven delivery and adoption, the role of Agentspace and AI innovation, the importance of optimism, and more.
Today’s incident response ain’t your grandfather’s IR. But the psychology surrounding it hasn’t changed an iota. This is precisely what Sam Rehman, EPAM’s Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, and Tab Bradshaw, Chief Operating Officer at Redpoint Cybersecurity, are talking about on this #SecurityByDesign conversation. “It really comes down to the preparation piece,” says Bradshaw. It’s about being well prepared and asking: “How often do you prepare in your organization, at a technical level, at an executive level, to handle some sort of incident?” Rehman agrees and says that he has clients wondering, “OK, so when am I done?” The perception is that being IR-ready is enough, he says. “That's not the case. It's a muscle. It's emotion. It's how you work. It's how you react to it.”There are benefits to knowing the proper way to react. “A well-handled breach really builds credibility,” says Bradshaw, adding that the word “reasonable” is omnipresent in IR documentation. He says: “Reasonableness is not just about having a mitigation strategy.” It’s also about, say, practicing tabletop exercises. Regularly. So that when you’re asked about doing regular tabletop sessions, the answer is, as Bradshaw puts it: “Yes, we did it every quarter for the past five years. We feel like we're in a pretty good spot that if something happens, might not be perfect, but we think we have good preparation, consistent preparation, consistent practice, to your point, to respond to the incident when it does occur.”Rehman says that security people are “used to having that sudden sense of violent impulse and urgency coming to us,” but what about the business leaders and everyone else in the organization? He asks Bradshaw about IR communication: “How do you guide the team through it, especially when everybody's thinking about, ‘Oh, am I gonna be on the news?’”Of the thousands of breaches Bradshaw and his team have responded to, for “a third, maybe half” of them, there is “some internal chaos at the client—and it's not because anybody's doing a bad thing.” “It really comes down to what I call C-squared,” says Bradshaw, which is shorthand for “communication and coordination. Someone has to be the quarterback.”Bradshaw says the chaos is about “a lack of preparation and testing.” A tabletop exercise needs to be a live fire exercise: “Doing it once a year is not good.” Too many organizations treat IR as a checklist, which is a mistake. He says: “It's a living, cross-functional discipline that evolves with the threat landscape externally, obviously, and also internally as people move.”And so? Get moving. Hit play and get ready. Host: Lisa KocianEngineer: Kyp PilalasProducer: Ken Gordon
What does the phrase “aquatic corporate community” mean to you? A school of fish in business suits holding an underwater meeting around a table of coral? Well, for our guests on the latest episode of The Resonance Test, it’s all about plunging into a strategic social responsibility program called “Let’s Swim Together.” Antonio Silva, President of European Aquatics, and Kate Pretkel, EPAM’s VP and Head of Sustainability Programs, have pooled their knowledge to answer questions from Balázs Magyar, Senior Director of Account Management at EPAM. Swimming is not just sports skill, says Silva, “It's a life skill.” He rightly points out that the pool is a place that can be used by everyone: babies, children, and adults. And, as Magyar notes, it promotes discipline, responsibility, social connections, and physical- and mental health. “Let’s Swim Together,” is starting with a pilot program for EPAM Hungary but the program will expand to other companies, other countries. Silva adds that with this initiative, we can reach “the specific goals of a company” and “so-called environmental, social and governance goals.”This is good news for Pretkel, who speaks ESG fluently. She says that EPAM has a long tradition of helping employees “to make a good impact on the communities that we live and work in,” adding that “It's not just about people working for a specific company, but also their friends, their families, their kids and their communities.” The challenge, with all these groups, is getting people to take the first step toward the water. “We are looking at the whole employee experience,” says Pretkel. The trick is making it easier for our employees to join. To do so, they are incorporated into the “overall experience that we are creating for them.” She says it’s all about “building these habits and also in some cases engaging the team so they can help each other to make this first step.”In short, Silva and Pretkel are excited about building what Antonio calls, yes, “the aquatic corporate community.” He concludes: “It's about reaching some social goals that [the participants] could not reach if they were not involved in such an activity.”Host: Macy DonawayEngineer: Kyp PilalasProducer: Ken Gordon
How are CISOs holding up in the era of AI? According to Tim Ramsay, Managing Director of Mandiant Client Advisory (now part of Google Cloud), and our guest on Silo Busting: “You have a number of parts of the organization that may be embracing AI without any involvement from central IT, and more importantly… without security.”Not an easy situation for a CISO. But not to worry, Ramsay and Sam Rehman, EPAM’s CISO and SVP, have seen this kind of thing before. In the pre-AI age, there were other technology inflection points, such as virtualization and the cloud, and our conversationalists learned that dealing with them involved clear communication and trust.Today’s CISOs “don't want to kill the business or stop the business,” says Ramsay. “They want to enable the business. But that kind of presupposes they know what the business is trying to do.” What’s necessary, he says, is for business leaders “to have some level of trust that the security people are actually going to bring something productive to the conversation and not just rule from a position of fear, uncertainty and doubt.”CISOs must teach their colleagues that secure business is, as Ramsay notes, a team sport and that organizations must know their data assets. Security people must also be clear about risk. “We need to be real about what type of threats we actually are engaging,” says Ramsay.The lessons of DeepSeek emerge during the episode. Ramsay says he thought there’d be “some voice in the room who would have said, ‘Guys, are we ready? Are we ready for global type of exposure here?’” Getting ready, in fact, means that security must be included from the beginning, both Ramsay and Rehman agree. Rehman adds: “To secure something as an aftermath is a million times more difficult than if you have security in mind when you’re actually going through that innovation process.” Rehman asks how CISOs can build the necessary trust. “Meetings are always good, but relationships are where it gets real,” replies Ramsay. “Conversations that CISOs are having alongside other C-levels are going to be much more effective” than meetings that can sometimes feel adversarial. Build strong enough relationships and sometimes business leaders will deliver the security message themselves. “It takes a secure CISO to let others carry the message sometimes,” says Ramsay. “It takes the pressure off the CISO to be always the bearer of threats and news of risk.”Says Rehman: “So much of security requires... letting go of that insecurity.”Host and Producer: Ken GordonEngineer: Kyp Pilalas
“If you want to know the future, look at the past.” While no one in their right mind would claim Einstein was giving any thought whatsoever to the future of the financial services industry, history would have once again proven him right if he had. Once upon a time, one’s choice of bank was based on how well that particular institution had won over your trust. That meant building relationships with the customers and the community at large.While it’s hard to envision any other reality, it’s only been a couple of decades where convenience and the digital experience became such dominating factors. But as banks increasingly leverage emerging technology to race toward automation and digital optimization, the notion of trust and relationship building has all but faded into the rearview. Or has it?“Yes, you need to have an amazing digital experience. It needs to be convenient, easy and it needs to flow… But you also need to be able to get ahold of a banker just as quickly. You need that opportunity to have someone jump into that digital experience as you’re a part of it–if you have a challenge, or a question or an alternative need. For our industry, that’s what everyone is trying to solve.” This is the mantra of Eric Sobie, SVP, Head of Consumer Sales and Strategy at Heartland Financial USA, Inc. It’s his belief that in order for the financial services industry to move forward, it needs to find a way to bridge the gap between the personalized experiences of the past with the efficiency and digital innovation of today.And as Chris Tapley, VP of Financial Services Consulting at EPAM, points out, it’s a notion with strong precedent behind it. “It’s interesting because what bank customers told us is that they have very disparate use cases for in-person versus digital interactions with their banks. They want to move money digitally; they want to check balances digitally; but when they need advice, or when they need a problem solved, they… want some kind of in-person interaction. Being able to converge that digital and human experience will be critical.”As the two discuss, it's this convergence where the emergent technologies of AI and generative AI will play an important role. While they might make it possible to further automate, optimize and streamline customer interactions – for example, recommending a specific product for a customer based on the available data – is this what consumers really want?As Sobie makes note, the alternative is to leverage these technologies to gain a more thorough understanding of the customer, and to upskill bankers to better build relationships with their customers based on this insight. “I think banks, rightfully so, are a little nervous about AI, because we are a business built upon trust; we want nothing to invalidate that trust. Let’s not use AI to create an opportunity to drive [a product] recommendation. But can we get predictive analytics? Can we understand where the customer is on their road map… and can we get a whole view of who that customer is from the data?” That’s how banks can bridge the gap between today’s digital environment and the personalized experiences of the past.Now, it’s time to dive into the full Resonance Test conversation. Enjoy your stay.Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Scott MacAllisterExecutive Producer: Ken Gordon
What should we be focusing on? It’s an essential question for all of us… but for those in the cybersecurity game, it’s critical. Focusing on the wrong things here can be costly. Or so says Neatsun Ziv, Co-Founder and CEO of OX Security, in this #CybersecurityByDesign conversation with Sam Rehman, EPAM’s CISO and SVP. Ziv says that, when it comes to fixing code, “95% of the things” that organizations work on have “zero risk impact,” adding: “That is an insane amount of money that the organization should have spent creating a bigger gap between them and the competitors.”Managing risk is indeed a major challenge for contemporary organizations. “There's no such thing as one single application anymore,” says Rehman, who wonders: “How do you manage the inherent risk from all these components?”Ziv says the answer is about getting clients to focus on what’s critical to them. There’s a need to distinguish between vulnerability, theoretical risk and actual practical risk. What is a practical risk? It means getting clients to recognize, as an organization: “This is what I'm concerned about.” “I always tell people the risk is managed,” adds Rehman, who says that approach is underpinned by asking questions such as “What's your security posture?” and assessing a client’s risk tolerance.“You need to be smart about the investment,” says Ziv. He notes that this is where experienced leaders become practical. He gets them to answer questions like: What's exposed? What's internal? What do you want to replace first? How do we do it? Ultimately, he says, it’s getting clients to be mature enough to say that they’d focus on the “5% [of efforts] that would actually make a difference in the first year or the second year.” The trick is taking a balanced approach, and the guys bring the idea of balance into the realms of supply chain and open source. We leave you with a warning: Listening might have a serious impact on your own security posture. Click play now! Host: Kenji RossEngineer: Kyp PilalasProducer: Ken Gordon
“Can we use generative AI in a way that teaches us something that we might not have known otherwise, and in that learning… create something that actually has the potential to increase agency for all inside of the system?”Good question, Angela Stockman! It is, in fact, one of many good questions that Stockman, the author of The Writer’s Guide to Pedagogical Documentation, raises as our guest on The Resonance Test.In this episode, Stockman joins Kristen Heist, Senior Director of Innovation Consulting at EPAM Continuum, and our Brian Imholte to dig deep into Gen AI and education. Part of that digging involves the art of asking questions. Heist says that while building a tutor with input from educators, teachers have been “pushing us to design tools that follow the principles of Socratic method” and not just giving the answers to students. Stockman agrees saying that teachers don’t want to see “learners leaning on AI tools just to generate answers or to produce work in ways that you know undermine their opportunity to sharpen their own saw.”The hope is that students will become keen enough to create whole new ways of doing things—and that teachers will, too. Part of teachers’ craft, says Heist, is “learning what works for their students, learning what their students understand, learning who their students are.” But the reality is that teachers are extremely time-constrained. And this makes personalization a challenge. Stockman says that for teachers “who are working with sometimes over one hundred students in a single day,” personalization is “kind of unrealistic”—but a GenAI tutor can truly help.The real focus is where GenAI tools can, as Heist says, “elevate the teacher's craft,” as opposed to replacing what they're currently doing.And let’s not forget data! Stockman says that AI is “helping us scoop the data out of their lived learning experiences. We don't have to bring learning to a halt in order to assess what's going on and it can help us with the interpretation of massive amounts of qualitative data.” If you have questions about GenAI and EDU, and you know you do, listen up. Host: Alison KotinEngineer: Kyp PilalasProducer: Ken Gordon
We’re talking about the lab of the future! Better than that… we’re building it. In this episode of The Resonance Test, two of the builders are giving us a tour of sorts! Listen as Sridhar Iyengar, Founder, Chief Strategy and Technology Officer and Chairman of Elemental Machines, and Chris Waller, EPAM’s VP and Chief Scientist, chew the scientific fat about creating a collaborative model cell and gene therapy laboratory.Waller says the lab of the future seeks to “reinvent the way we look at equipment and utilize equipment in a laboratory setting that's used to manufacture cells” by making it, as we say, real. “We’re building out that facility at the EPAM Continuum office in Boston and partnering with folks like Elemental Machines” to enable “the transformation that we're looking for in these laboratory settings.”Creating such a next-gen lab is a very complicated task, says Iyengar. “Unlike many other disciplines that are primarily software driven or even mechanically driven, the life sciences have a much greater degree of variability.” To minimize this variability, they’re putting an Amazon Go level of scrutiny on lab processes. AI, Iyengar says, “can spot patterns across an enormous number of variables and dimensions, much more than any human being can do… To do that you need lots of data, so you can cancel out the noise and you can find the signal in the noise.” The key step here, he adds, is to collect “as many dimensions of data as possible and make it computationally available.”Iyengar says that capturing the context around how lab data is collected is essential for making generative AI a useful lab tool. GenAI, he says, “creates something when you give it a prompt,” but in this case “the prompt has to include the context in which that work was carried out.” He reports being hopeful about GenAI’s role in the lab, “but I think we're still a few years away.”At present, says Waller, the EPAM Continuum facility enables us to give the future a test run. The lab “allows us to bring our clients, our members of the [Pistoia] Alliance [and] our technology partners together in a safe space to work collectively to derisk the introduction of new technologies into these laboratory settings and show us the future.”Iyengar adds that when he walks people through the lab, “You see their eyes light up and say, ‘Ohh, I get it; that means we can do XYZ!’” Listen to these two and you’ll soon be having your own XYZ thoughts. Host: Alison KotinEngineer: Kyp PilalasProducer: Ken Gordon
“One of the most essential parts of bringing innovation to market is often the most rarely noted,” says host Macy Donaway on the latest Resonance Test podcast. “And it’s those dedicated client leads and sponsors who have political capital built that they can spend to then overcome hurdles.” We call such people mavericks, and Uma Gopinath, the CIO of Porter Airlines and our podcast guest, perfectly embodies that term. Gopinath has been a highly successful change-maker in numerous companies and industries (she was the CIO of Metrolinx, the Director of Technology and Innovation at Lush, and the AVP of Intelligent Automation at Canadian Tire Corporation). Along the way, she has learned how to thrive in the heavily male-dominated technology industry and shares some of her wisdom in this conversation. Giving back, in fact, is central to her work. “As a person of privilege, you need to share that privilege with others,” she says, noting that when at Metrolinx, she noticed the diversity of her teams was “in the low teens when we started,” and by the time she exited “We were close to 30-35% in diversity.”She says that change happens “by intention.” And notes that when a woman didn’t win a particular role, she would ask her colleagues why and was often told, “But she’s the second best.” To this, Gopinath argued that perhaps she was “second best because she's never been given the opportunity to be the first best.”Fixing systemic bias, she notes: “Calls for courage, calls for some unpopular statements sometimes.”Courage is a central part of Gopinath’s general ethos, and it takes the shape of a willingness to be curious, to experiment (and experiment at scale: “your denominator has to be big for you to get those useful, successful experiments,” she says). Gopinath talks up the importance of focusing on the customer. Continuously. Gopinath notes that many organizations brew up a business case and do a project, “but then nobody goes back to effectively evaluate” the outcomes originally projected. Consequently, she says, “We hear lots of stories about how IT projects don’t deliver.”She adds that sometimes it’s “a small feedback loop that's required” and that doing “a little more to get to that bigger benefit” is something businesses need to do better.Gopinath ends with some memorable maverick-level inspiration for future leaders: “Enjoy what you're doing. If you’re not having fun, then go be successful somewhere else.”Now go have fun and listen to the episode! Host: Alison KotinEngineer: Kyp PilalasProducer: Ken Gordon
“Open source” is, of course, a technology term. But, as it turns out, when you connect tech-minded people with those who don’t necessarily think of themselves as IT nerds, something magical can happen. In this case, what works in the digital world—transparency, community, collaboration—has a funny way of spilling over into the analog world. Because, well, people are people. We’re wired to connect.In today’s episode of The Resonance Test, EPAM’s open source sage Chris Howard chats up two open source experts from EBSCO Information Services: Christopher Spalding, Vice President of Product, and Rachel Fadlon, Vice President of SaaS Marketing and National Conferences & Events. EBSCO is a founding member of Folio, an open source library services platform (LSP), to which EPAM contributes.The Open Source Initiative (OSI) maintains a precise definition for the term, but in broad strokes, open source refers to software containing source code that can be edited and used by anyone. We all use it every day without realizing it. Indeed, open source powers the internet as we know it. Howard asked Spalding and Fadlon to reflect on what open source has been like at EBSCO, so other companies and industries can learn from an open source project that has achieved scale. Folio has allowed developers and librarians to work together in an unprecedented way. Being part of the Folio community, says Fadlon, has dramatically transformed the way EBSCO interacts with customers across the company. The relationships that develop organically in an open source community, which are less formal and more “person to person,” says Fadlon, have influenced EBSCO to be more community-oriented in all aspects of the business. “The way that you approach someone in the library as a community member to a community member is very different than the way we were approaching our customers before,” she says. “We’ve made a lot more things more transparent and open” since joining Folio.Spalding says even the language has changed around communications more broadly. “The focus is on, ‘Well, why would that be closed? Let’s make that open. Why wouldn’t we talk about that?’ Let’s put it all on the table because we get feedback instantly, and then we know the direction that we go as a partnership with the larger community.”Of course, the trio also talked about security and artificial intelligence, the latter playing out differently in different regions. Open source made headlines recently when Linux, one of the most well-known examples of open source, narrowly avoided a cybersecurity disaster thanks to an eagle-eyed engineer. Open source comes with risks, like anything online. Spalding says security concerns might have pushed libraries away from open source a few years ago, but now, increasingly, libraries are adopting the open source adage: “More eyes, fewer bugs. And definitely, more eyes, better security.” Howard agrees. “We shouldn’t be afraid of having all of those eyes on us… One of my developers calls it kind of ‘battle testing’ the software, throwing it out to the world and saying, ‘Does this do what you want it to do?’ And if it doesn’t, at least you can tell me … and I can go and fix it or you can even fix it for me if you want to. And I think we’re now finding more and more organizations that actually find that more attractive than scary.”Open yourself up to a more flexible, transparent future by listening to this engaging conversation. Host/Producer: Lisa KocianEngineer: Kyp PilalasExecutive Producer: Ken Gordon
Responsible AI isn’t about laying down the law. Creating responsible AI systems and policies is necessarily an iterative, longitudinal endeavor. Doing it right requires constant conversation among people with diverse kinds of expertise, experience and attitudes. Which is exactly what today’s episode of The Resonance Test embodies. We bring to the virtual table David Goodis, Partner at INQ Law, and Martin Lopatka, Managing Principal of AI Consulting at EPAM, and ask them to lay down their cards. Turns out, they are holding insights as sharp as diamonds. This well-balanced pair begins by talking about definitions. Goodis mentions the recent Canadian draft legislation to regulate AI, which asks “What is harm?” because, he says, “What we're trying to do is minimize harm or avoid harm.” The legislation casts harm as physical or psychological harm, damage to a person's property (“Suppose that could include intellectual property,” Goodis says), and any economic loss to a person. This leads Lopatka to wonder whether there should be “a differentiation in the way that we legislate fully autonomous systems that are just part of automated pipelines.” What happens, he wonders, when there is an inherently symbiotic system between AI and humans, where “the design is intended to augment human reasoning or activities in any way”?Goodis is comforted when a human is looped in and isn’t merely saying: “Hey, AI system, go ahead and make that decision about David, can he get the bank loan, yes or no?”This nudges Lopatka to respond: “The inverse is, I would say, true for myself. I feel like putting a human in the loop can often be a way to shunt off responsibility for inherent choices that are made in the way that AI systems are designed.” He wonders if more scrutiny is needed in designing the systems that present results to human decision-makers.We also need to examine how those systems operate, says Goodis, pointing out that while an AI system might not be “really making the decision,” it might be “steering that decision or influencing that decision in a way that maybe we're not comfortable with.”This episode will prepare you to think about informed consent (“It's impossible to expect that people have actually even read, let alone comprehended, the terms of services that they are supposedly accepting,” says Lopatka), the role of corporate oversight, the need to educate users about risk, and the shared obligation involved in building responsible AI. One fascinating exchange centered on the topic of autonomy, toward which Lopatka suggests that a user might have mixed feelings. “Maybe I will object to one use [of personal data] but not another and subscribe to the value proposition that by allowing an organization to process my data in a particular way, there is an upside for me in terms of things like personalized services or efficiency gains for myself. But I may have a conscientious objection to [other] things.”To which Goodis reasonably asks: “I like your idea, but how do you implement that?”There is no final answer, obviously, but at one point, Goodis suggests a reasonable starting point: “Maybe it is a combination of consent versus ensuring organizations act in an ethical manner.”This is a conversation for everyone to hear. So listen, and join Goodis and Lopatka in this important dialogue. Host: Alison KotinEngineer: Kyp PilalasProducer: Ken Gordon
Can today’s companies afford to be luddites? This is one of the big questions that Elaina Shekhter, EPAM’s Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer and SVP, puts to today’s Resonance Test guest, Rowan Curran, Senior Analyst at Forrester. In the case of generative AI, both answer: No. Why? Shekhter notes that whatever your competitive edge in 2022, today everyone is encountering a different mode of operations. The positioning around the success or failure of your AI efforts must be “accelerating along the vector of AI, because the opportunity to get away from the competition, faster, is much greater now than it ever has been.”In a lively and informed session of back-and-forth, they parse what is real and what is a hallucination in GenAI at this moment.Curran says that lately there has been an “ebullient explosion” of work on tools and approaches to manage system outputs. “Are we there yet in terms of having these be optimized architectures and things like that? Absolutely not. But is there tons of work being done there or are we approaching reasonable solutions to those problems? Yes, absolutely.”What should companies be doing to ensure they're ready to benefit and succeed with AI?“Right now, everybody's building the gen one of enterprise generative AI applications,” says Curran, and this will make them ubiquitous. But if your organization fails to adopt them, he adds: “You are going to be falling behind everybody else who is actually building with this stuff today.”Listen closely and learn what will the currency of the future be, the commercial and economic models of successful GenAI, the nature of productivity gains: “Somebody saving 30 minutes per day who makes $60K a year is going to have a very different economic impact on the company versus somebody who makes $200K a year and saves 30 minutes per day,” Curran says. They also discuss how this new tech will transform the shape of work and what companies will be focusing on this year: “2023 is the year of excitement and experimentation, and 2024 is the year of optimization and efficiency,” says Curran.Oh… and it might also transform the future of fun! “I do think we could use the new technology to make work more fun for people,” says Shekhter, who sees in the soaring advance of multimodal LLMs an opportunity for people “to develop in an enlightened way.”Enlighten yourself first. Smash that play button. Host: Alison KotinEngineer: Kyp PilalasProducer: Ken Gordon
“There’s been an incident,” is a sentence no one wants to hear… except perhaps people like Ron Konigsberg, Co-Founder and CTO of Gem and our guest on Silo Busting, whose business is cloud incident response (IR).We know what you’re thinking: What makes cloud IR different from all other forms of IR? Let’s let Konigsberg explain: “The challenge is that the cloud is technically simply different.” If you’re using legacy tools, “you're going to protect probably 20% of the cloud.”Konigsberg is joined in conversation by Sam Rehman, EPAM’s Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, and the pair are pelted with questions by Aviv Srour, our Head of Cyber Innovation.Konigsberg says that incident responders need to “adapt from network and agents to services and APIs, and constantly learn about new services and stay up to date and up to speed” with what the bad guys are picking up.Oh, those bad guys! Regarding attackers, Konigsberg says: “They adopt innovation faster than defenders.” They can do so because they have fewer dependencies “and they care less [than defenders do] about breaking things.”To illustrate, he asks us to think about migrating to the cloud: Imagine you’re an attacker and you simply never worry about any legacy systems from your previous environments. “They have much more liberty and they move faster.”“They adopt techniques about new services that each cloud provider is releasing tomorrow,” says Konigsberg. So it is, in some ways, about playing catch-up. CISOs have had to adopt a new mindset and posture. “You can only block so many punches until you have to figure out [that] you need to move around, you need to counter, and so on,” says Rehman.Rehman adds that CISOs have finally understood the “shared responsibility between you and the cloud provider.” But that’s not the only issue with the cloud. “It's much flatter than what you’re used to on prem,” he says. “Which means a lateral attack is a lot quicker, moving things around a lot easier, and the simplicity of people actually moving things around and infecting a large area is substantially higher.”So how can an organization properly respond to, and learn to prioritize within, the cloud conundrum? One answer, says Rehman, is culture. “We have to adopt a learning culture in security,” he says. “They’re always gonna be one step ahead of us, but at least we're one step behind, not ten.” Pick up the pace of your learning and listen to the experts speak. Hit play! Host: Lisa KocianEditor: Kyp PilalasProducer: Ken Gordon
Sam Rehman—a frequent voice on this podcast network and EPAM’s Chief Information Security Officer and SVP—was in the classroom recently, teaching students, and in the process was “surprised by the density of PII that's in in the system.” This led Rehman to realize that “at least here in California,” higher education’s investment in cybersecurity is “substantially behind.”Catching up is a theme of today’s conversation about privacy, education, and artificial intelligence. Speaking for the (cyber)defense, with Rehman, is today’s guest on The Resonance Test, Scott Loughlin, Partner and Global Co-Lead of the Privacy & Cybersecurity Practice at the law firm Hogan Lovells. “It took a long time to get people to understand that the easiest thing to do is not always the right thing to do to protect the company’s interest and protect the company’s data,” says Loughlin. “And that is an experience that we'll all have with respect to generative AI tools.”Loughlin and Rehman are put through their conversational paces from questions by Brian Imholte, our Head of Education & Learning Services.They have much to say about data governance (“Data is not by itself anymore, it's broken up in pieces, combined, massaged, and then pulled out from a model,” says Rehman), data pedigree, the laws—and lack thereof—regarding privacy and generative AI. They also kick around the role that FERPA assumes here. “You’re trying to deploy this old framework against this new technology, which is difficult,” says Loughlin, adding: “There are some key areas of tension that will come up with using generative AI with student data.”So where might an educational publisher or school begin? “Focus on your value first,” says Rehman. Do your experiments, but do them in small pieces, he says: "And then within those small pieces, know what you're putting into the model.”This informative and spirited conversation is even occasionally funny. Loughlin brings up a court case about whether or not a selfie-taking monkey selfie would own the copyright to the photo. “The court said no,” notes Loughlin, adding that US Copyright laws are “designed to protect the authorship of humans, not of monkeys, and in this case not of generative AI tools.” Download now: It’s sure to generate some new thoughts. Host: Kenji RossEngineer: Kyp PilalasProducer: Ken Gordon
Going mobile: It’s going to create vulnerabilities. That’s the way things work with apps. They aren’t just friendly pieces of software that help you beat traffic or bring your favorite tunes into your eardrums… they are opportunities, rich ones, for the bad guys.Andrew Whaley, the Senior Technical Director (UK) at Promon and our guest on Silo Busting, says that with an app, “You have to be able to trust the security model that you've got around it.” Whaley talks with Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, about how apps operate on a client-server model, but “all the client code is distributed outside of your enterprise.” Some of these users could well be criminals who, once gaining access to that code, could "reverse engineer it and come up with ways to attack that.”And the code in those apps can be a bit suspect. Whaley says that most apps are made up of 80% open-source software. “You know how many of those app developers go and build that source themselves from source and read over it before they compile?” he asks and then answers: “Probably close to zero.”Speaking of putting the work in… Rehman talks about calibrating “the level of effort that the attacker would have to go through versus the yield.” The trick is, he says, layering on cybersecurity techniques “so that the yield is not worth it for them.”Whaley replies that “once you layer obfuscation on, you then have this impenetrable forest” and that the “immediately accessible ways of attacking [an application] are taken off the table.”Together they chat about supply chain attacks, nonlinear programming, and more. Tune in and be safe(r)!Host: Glenn GruberEditor: Kyp PilalasProducer: Ken Gordon
In this special edition of Silo Busting, Elaina Shekhter, EPAM’s Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer, interviews Stepan Mitish, VP and Head of Ukraine, about how his role shifted from being a leader navigating war-time crises to a leader embracing the challenges of the business world. Mitish says that the year 2022 was so filled with extreme challenges that he and his team can count it as “three or five years of experience.”He says the experience truly seasoned his team: “We understood what a great team means, not just in theory.” In hindsight, Mitish says, the experience puts COVID in perspective: “At that time, it was something catastrophical… but now you recall it with a smile on your face."Mitish talks about how he and his team started preparation for a potential war before it actually took place, creating a very solid business continuity plan (BCP). But if you ask whether he believed it would happen: “I didn't, and even now, for me it's hard to accept how could anybody in the 21st century do what actually was done.”He tells the harrowing story of how it began very early one morning. Lots of messages pouring in from areas under attack. After that, “It was very loud night and morning,” he says, adding that he was focused on the quiet evacuation of our people to so-called shelters in the western part of Ukraine. Vinnytsia. Lviv. Ivano-Frankivsk. Uzhhorod.At the beginning of the war, he was orchestrating 15,000 employees but they were working as one. He says that after a week, “I was afraid to start hearing a lot of complaints from our clients about failed delivery, non-delivery in services.” Instead, he received emails from clients “who were praising our teams for working days and nights and even delivering planned releases.”By the second or third week, everyone understood that Russia could not do a “so-called blitzkrieg in three days” and that it wasn’t “possible to break Ukrainians and to break EPAM in Ukraine.” He says: “Despite all the challenges, all the craziness that was going on,” he and his team continued to deliver. Relentlessly. “People were doing incredible, heroic things on the ground, but also doing delivery from bomb shelters and various faraway locations where people ended up moving to in order to avoid actually being in the midst of ongoing attacks,” says Shekhter. “From your point of view, why do you think they did it?”Mitish says it was a combination of two things: (a) “Probably it's part of Ukrainian values or DNA to be very much focused on results”; and (b) “We don't have any other home and we understand that we fight for our lives, for our workplaces, for our families. And if not me, then who's going to do that?”So where are we now in Ukraine?“I believe that the worst, worst days are already behind us,” says Mitish who wants to encourage our clients and future clients to support Ukraine and bring more business there. “I strongly believe that once this war is over and Ukraine wins, there will be a huge queue of those companies’ investors… and if you're going to be on the end of the queue, probably it will be much harder to find the best talent for you and your business.”You’ll want to listen to our resilient colleague tell his amazing story. Do so! Host: Alison KotinEngineer: Kyp PilalasProducer: Ken Gordon
Equity is not easy. It’s tough enough to talk honestly about equity in US healthcare, and troublingly difficult to create solutions that can, and will, be implemented. But trouble—good trouble, as Representative John Lewis once put it—is precisely what interests the people on the latest episode of The Resonance Test. Dr. Djinge Lindsay, MD, MPH, and Arianne Graham are here to talk about their stalwart attempts to solve for equity. Johnathon Swersey, Senior Director of Innovation at EPAM, creates all kinds of necessary trouble by putting tough questions to our two guests. Swersey begins by addressing the idea that given the less-than-optimal state of US healthcare, why are we focusing on equity?“If we don't fix the health disparities in our country, those will spread to the rest of the population and it becomes not just a public health issue, but frankly, a national security issue,” says Graham.Or conversationalists agree that there has been much talk about equity but that talk is far too insufficient. “There has been a lot of verbal acknowledgement of the fact that structural racism is pervasive and all of our systems, including healthcare, but that verbal acknowledgement hasn't necessarily been followed with action,” says Dr. Lindsay.To move things forward, we need to align our moral imperatives with proper levels of funding. Dr. Lindsay asks us to consider the history of social change: “There have been few successful social change movements that haven't been aligned with some financial incentive for those who hold power.”One such alignment must just be possible with the new Health Equity Index that's being introduced to Medicare Advantage. Healthcare players, says Dr. Lindsay, will now be required to not only “look at their data, not only stratify their data but to action on closing disparity gaps. Closing differences in health outcomes for people based on their race.”Ultimately, it’s about beginning from what Graham calls “an asset- as opposed to a deficit-based approach.” She says that understanding the history, pain, and ramifications of structural racism is important but also “there is space to celebrate what makes different cultures unique and use that as a leverage point to engage folks in conversation about health. To tap into the trusted messengers, trusted leaders, and representative figures within communities that are delivering messages of self-actualization and self-efficacy in managing our health.”Let’s hope we can manage to take a step in a healthier direction. Begin by listening. Host: Alison KotinEngineer: Kyp PilalasExecutive Producer: Ken Gordon
Financial inclusion is one of those topics that banks are often eager to discuss. After all, their efforts here can have profound impacts on their customers and the communities in which they operate and can generate positive PR spins that showcase the brand in a different light. However, it’s rare to see true innovation in the realm of financial inclusion that profoundly alters things for customers and their communities.Enter Briana Marbury, CEO at Interledger Foundation, who aims to reshape the payments and remittance space as a way to drive major positive changes for communities across the globe. Briana sat with EPAM’s Alex Jimenez to discuss how innovations in payments technology and the proliferation of the Interledger Protocol are rewriting the financial inclusion story.“Financial inclusion means accessible and equitable access to…accounts and other financial services banks offer like access to credit and housing loans,” says Marbury. In the past, banks have been hesitant to invest in infrastructure in poorer communities as they don’t view such areas as a good return on investment in the delivery of those services. As a consequence, millions of low-income people found themselves with limited access to bank accounts and services. “This lack of infrastructure led to the adoption of mobile money and underbanked consumers moving money digitally among their peers.” When viewed on a global scale, this lack of access to banking infrastructure is a massive issue. The World Bank reports that there are 1.4 billion adults without access to banks. To which Marbury says: “One thing many of [unbanked adults] do have access to is mobile phones.” As a result, there have been a number of payments apps that have been adopted around the world to help these individuals transfer money via mobile transactions. But many of these apps are powered by payments remittance systems that are siloed regionally or geographically. “What we’re trying to do is expand on the work that’s already being done to create interoperability among systems… and create more opportunities for people to participate in their digital financial world,” Marbury says, explaining how the goal of her work with Interledger is to increase the global adoption of a more transparent remittance system. And if her work is successful, it has the potential to have a very real and positive impact on communities around the world.Right now, it’s time to enrich your understanding with the complete Silo Busting conversation. Get clicking! Host: Mo Banjoko Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Scott MacAllister Executive Producer: Ken Gordon
The hype around generative AI remains strong. Right now, we’re nestled (un)comfortably atop the peak of this hype, wondering what in the world might come next. We’ve seen generative AI beat the bar exam. We’ve also, more recently, seen it fail to answer simple math equations.
Regardless of some of its failings, there’s no denying that these extremely rapid advancements in generative AI and its adoption trajectory are akin to the advent of the internet and the smartphone. Big things are surely on the horizon.
Still, the path ahead is fuzzy, and many companies aren’t sure how to move forward. The biggest question that’s holding them back: “Is our data going to be safe?”
Our own Sam Rehman, SVP, Chief Information Security Officer, and Val Tsitlik, VP, Head of Data & Analytics, convened to acknowledge this mass consensus and how modern enterprises should be reframing this question.
When companies start thinking through AI data security, “You can get pretty deep down [a] rabbit hole and start thinking about very, very complex scenarios and very complex attack vectors,” says Tsitlik. “Really, the best place to start is with the fundamentals, before you go ahead and start building applications.”
And the discussion doesn’t stop there. Adoption is going to require a monumental culture shift and, “to change an entire organization to be comfortable to embrace working with some form of computer assistant; that’s a whole different ball game,” says Rehman.
Slowly crawling toward exploration and experimentation is futile. Change is knocking at your door, now.
And let’s get one thing straight, folks—things are going to be messy. But that’s all part of disruption, isn’t it? The curious innovators who embrace the messy unknown are the ones who come out stronger on the other side.
“If you don’t start now, I don’t know how much time you’ll need to catch up… Do it and try to embrace it in small chunks,” says Rehman.
Now let’s hear more about what Sam and Val have to say on the fundamentals of data security in an AI-first world.
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Hillary Tiene Executive Producer: Ken Gordon
The cloud creates “cloud cowboys,” says Yinon Costica, VP of Product and Co-Founder of Wiz.
This creates, as you might imagine, security issues.
“Cloud allows people to really own their stuff end-to-end. They can basically create whatever they want,” says Costica. But he says that security professionals need to ensure that the cowboys can “govern their environments in a way that is secured while they continue to build.”
These issues set the theme for this #CyberesecurityByDesign conversation between Costica, Sam Rehman, EPAM’s Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, and Aviv Srour, our Head of Cyber Innovation.
Rehman notes that the frequency of change in cloud is “great for software engineering,” but adds: “It also makes it very, very difficult for you to actually find your baseline, your footing,” regarding security.
One of the most useful things we learn in this episode is how cloud might help spread the responsibility for security. In the past, security was solely the problem of the security team but with cloud and its self-serve nature, Costica says: “Security now should be democratized to those who are actually managing the environments, running the resources, have the right context.”
As a group, the guys talk about the differences between on-prem and cloud security, the role of visibility plays in cloud, the pragmatism cloud brings to security, and more.
Understanding the manifold nature of cloud is critical, and it will require a lot more education than many organizations realize. Says Rehman: “If you don't have a good understanding of what your cloud looks like, which is majority of people out there, then you still have a huge problem.”
Be part of the solution: Listen.
Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
When it comes to financial literacy, many banks and financial institutions claim it’s something they actively prioritize for their customers. In reality, this often tends to be lip service. “Banks like to think they’re doing something in this space….They’ll write a long blog that will sit in a resource page on their website. But if you look at the analytics behind those pages, generally they have very few views. They’re not teaching anything to anyone, and this content is just not visible.” This is the claim of Alex Jimenez, EPAM’s Managing Principal of Financial Services Consulting, as he and Theodora Lau, Founder of Unconventional Ventures, discuss the shortcomings of retail banks when it comes to providing customers with financial literacy and guidance.
“What is their [the bank’s] intention for putting this information out there? Is it just to check a box? Or are they doing it because they genuinely want to help?” asks Lau. If it’s truly the latter, then their efforts are genuinely falling short, especially in this time of unprecedented technological innovation. Worse yet, the one-size-fits-all approach—like an online resource center—fails to address the unique and varied needs of a large swathe of customers. “In the data from a recent survey we conducted, we found that Gen Zers were using physical branches at nearly the same rates as Boomers. It’s because mainly they want to have someone in person to talk to them. And part of that is because we have not done a great job to give young people an understanding of finance,” says Jimenez .
To that extent, banks also need to be cognizant of how they’re training their frontline staff to have financial literacy conversations. Jimenez touches on this, saying, “From a banking side, we also don’t tool our customer-facing employees to be able to do some of this. The philosophy has been, ‘Consumers know us as a bank and therefore will come to us because they trust us and that’s when we can give them guidance about managing their money.’” However, this shortsighted approach can actually leave banks vulnerable to their FinTech and big tech competitors, providing an opening for them to take away market share.
The good news is, there are plenty of opportunities for banks to close this gap with technology. Jimenez says:, “My credit card gives me an alert every time I make a purchase. I love that. But every once in a while, I want that alert to be more than just an alert saying, ‘You just spent $100 on Amazon.’ Give me some contextual advice specific to that transaction. That’s the sort of thing that we in the industry could do if we had the wherewithal to do it.”
Right now, it’s time to familiarize yourself with the full Silo Busting conversation. Get clicking!
Host: Mo Banjoko Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Scott MacAllister Executive Producer: Ken Gordon
The era of generative AI needs humans… not just the data sets they create. Now and going forward, companies will need to depend on perceptive, intelligent, creative humans who can evaluate and, when necessary, stand up to the black box output AI throws at them. What kind of traits do such people embody? Where might we find them? What might they teach the rest of us? That’s what this episode of Silo Busting is all about. Tariq King, VP and Head of Product-Service Systems, and Ira Livshits, Senior Data Scientist at EPAM, meet the test-based questions of Producer Ken Gordon with knowledge and aplomb.
King, who spent much of his career hiring testers, says he looks for “the way that someone actually approaches solving problems and thinking perhaps in a different way or from a different perspective.”
Livshits notes that with testing in generative AI, “sometimes there is no right or wrong” and that a tester will “have to act or decide based on his or her understanding of the field and maybe intuition.” In short, she says, testing has become much less of a black-and-white job.
Together King and Livshits create a model conversation. They talk about how explainability fits in here, why musicians and liberal arts people make for good testers, the importance of being able to relate findings to a given audience (“[if] I have a PhD focused on machine learning, probably I can understand certain things in a different way than someone who may not have that degree,” says King), and how generative AI is bringing the role of testing closer to the fore.
Go on, give it a test-listen.
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
When it comes to empowering women—truly empowering them—The Estée Lauder Companies is doing something different. We know this because Michael Smith, CIO of ECL, recently dropped by The Resonance Test to talk about the extensive success they’ve had in this area. In a conversation with Regina Viadro, EPAM’s VP and Co-Head of North American Business, and Resonance Test Producer Ken Gordon, Smith details how his organization promotes women’s leadership and diversity within the company and in the broader community.When your company serves people, whether colleagues or consumers, Smith says: “Your organization should reflect that and be representative of the people you serve.”One way they do this is through their Open Doors program which is, in Smith’s words, “a learning community. It's a movement that develops talent and it's focused on building culture.”The program features a weeklong leadership intensive, a year of coaching support, and access to an online interactive learning community. It's an impressive approach to creating a talent ecosystem, and the effects of the Open Doors initiatives are undeniable. •Nearly 90% of the intensive participants are still with the company.•52% have been promoted.•100% of the Open Doors participants self-report, Smith says, “an increase in their growth mindset.”When it comes to women in tech, ELC is doing well. “The industry is the tech industry is at 28% women we're sitting today at 34%,” Smith says. “I'm not satisfied with that number. We know that we can do better.”Smith notes that his organization is interested in professional development at every layer. “We've doubled and tripled our internship program over the last few years, and we have a strong focus on recruiting women,” he says, adding: “We're seeing great success in people continuing to be promoted, continuing to grow into new roles.” Speaking of growth: ELC has a wonderful dual career path initiative in place. “In a traditional organization, people hit that manager level and the only way they can continue to grow is to get bigger jobs,” he notes that his organization has another, attractive option: “They don't want to lead large teams, they want to be experts and make an impact with their subject matter expertise.” (We know all about such a path!)Finally, Smith talks about The Tech Day of Pink, an initiative with a great mission: aiming to end breast cancer within our lifetime. All in all, it’s a fine, instructional conversation. Open your mind by listening to the stories of all the doors ELC has opened. Host: Alison KotinEngineer: Kyp PilalasProducer: Ken Gordon
The reason we don’t think of insurance as an industry on the cutting edge of technological innovation is that, well, it’s not. Not today anyway. Nonetheless, insurance’s brightest thinkers know a change is overdue and are making the transformation to digital a reality. Doing so involves the incorporation of robust data and analytics programs, and that’s precisely what we’re talking about on this episode of The Resonance Test. Lynn Rivenburgh, VP of Business Consulting at EPAM, joins Harini Wilkinson, SVP & Head of Data & Analytics for Protector Plans, a subsidiary of Brown & Brown Insurance, and Sirat Chhabra, our Director of Insurance Data & Analytics Consulting, for an appraisal of the role data and analytics currently (and ideally should play) in the insurance business. Wilkinson says that more and more insurance companies are investing in “data analytics strategies, in the road map to really use this to move forward.” She adds that the industry as a whole has been talking about the topic for some time but that the pandemic really escalated the need to act. “We're seeing that data analytics and becoming an insight-driven organization has been one of the top three priorities for our clients,” adds Chhabra.Chhabra details the saga of becoming a data analytics-driven organization in three stages: data collection, data preparation, and product creation for data analysis.And, of course, clients are all at different stages of data maturity. “In my current organization, where we're at the beginning, we've never really used data to drive our business forward,” says Wilkinson. They are at “the beginning stages of really understanding what data is there and how do we structure it in a way that we can use it.”Our three insurance-minded speakers get into the issues of data governance (a little silo-busting, please!), legacy systems, and the nuances of measuring success. If you’re thinking about insurance, this conversation will certainly carry your interest! Host: Alison KotinEngineer: Kyp PilalasProducer: Ken Gordon
If a bank releases a new digital product, but it’s not intuitive enough to resonate with customers, does it make a noise? When a bank undergoes a major digital transformation, what steps can they take to help ensure the experience they’ve painstakingly crafted resonates with customers and makes the right kind of noise in the marketplace? These are the sorts of questions Alex Jimenez, EPAM’s Managing Principal of Financial Services Consulting, is asking of John Findlay, CEO of LemonadeLXP, in this #TakeItToTheBank conversation.For many years now, Findlay and LemonadeLXP have introduced gamification to the onboarding process to improve the adoption rates of new digital products as banks roll these experiences out to their customers. “Inherently, we all want to believe we build software that’s intuitive, that people will easily understand and get up to speed on quickly,” says Findlay. “I think that optimism is born out of seeing amazing products like the iPhone and the iPad, but what’s forgotten is Apple had trillions to invest in UX.”So how can banks make customers feel comfortable with their new tech following a major digital transformation? Findlay says: “The best way to drive adoption is through your frontline. But what we’ve learned is that at about 70% of financial institutions, staff don’t bank with their employer. So, if they don’t bank with you, they don’t use your tech and if they don’t use your tech, there’s no way they can have customer conversations about it.”Given the current state of the global economy, providing customers with a satisfying digital experience is more important than ever. “We want to keep [customers] happy,” Jimenez says, “And not just customers but employees…because at the end of the day… if you’re not supporting people, there’s no point in putting more technology out there.” Findlay agrees. After all, it’s people who are the drivers of ROI when it comes to tech investments. And when customers embrace a bank’s tech and transition away from branch use to these digital transactions, the banks stand to see a major reduction in the costs of processing those transactions.But the responsibility for effective digital transformation shouldn’t fall solely on frontline employees. Leaders within the organization need to be the driving force behind adoption. And that’s where gamification can have a major impact on motivating leaders to embrace and model the use of new digital products. Jimenez says, “Gamification can take someone [in leadership] who’s not interested in the topic, who doesn’t see it as impactful to their job because they’re the head of mortgage, for instance, and then suddenly they’re a champion of the system and really understand how it works.” That kind of top-down embracing of a product, a piece of software or a particular user experience can greatly drive literacy throughout the organization.And that literacy has a direct impact on the bottom line. Findlay explains this notion through the lens of an agent in the contact center. Improved literacy means that agent is better equipped to walk customers through transactions, shortening talk time, improving the customer experience, and ultimately making the agent experience much less stressful (which can limit employee attrition).Right now, it’s time to familiarize yourself with the full Silo Busting conversation. Get clicking!Host: Mo Banjoko Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Scott MacAllisterExecutive Producer: Ken Gordon
On the latest #CybersecurityByDesign conversation, we’ve got our minds set on… hacking. Bruce Schneier, author of the recently published A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules and How to Bend Them Back Again, chats with Sam Rehman, EPAM’s Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, about the hacking mindset and what it means for security in the age of generative AI. Schneier gets the conversation rolling by defining a hacker as “Someone who finds a bug or vulnerability, a loophole in a set of rules, and exploits it to their advantage.”He talks about hacking not just computers but tax systems, hockey, tax codes, and Formula 1 racing. Rehman mentions that he appreciated a couple of Schneider’s examples and Schneier replies: “There are a couple? There are dozens of examples! Examples are what makes the book fun!” (Reader: The book is fun indeed.)Schneier notes that “hacking isn't necessarily good nor bad,” which might surprise some who live outside the perimeter of the cybersecurity world. “Hacking is how systems evolve. If I figure a clever way to use a system, to subvert a system that no one thought of before, there are benefits as well as costs.”The guys then get into the inevitable topic of 2023: The costs and benefits of hacking in the context of AI.“I think it's gonna be a big arms race in AI and security,” says Schneier, adding that in the near term, AI will benefit the defender. “The attacker is already attacking at computer speeds. Being able to defend at computer speeds will be an enormous benefit.”While he’s generally optimistic that AI will be good for the good guys, Schneier says “The transition period will be very chaotic.”This chaos will come from the idea of AI has a hacker. He points to the idea of accountants—human ones—poring through tax code looking for loopholes to exploit: “That feels like something that you can train an AI to do,” he says. “And what happens when AI finds vulnerabilities in tax codes or financial regulations or other sets of laws? How will that work? How fast will they be? How clever will they be? Will they find things that are just so complicated that humans would never have found them?”Schneier says that AI will increase the speed, scale, sophistication, and scope of hacking and wonders if these differences in degree will make a difference in kind. Then he answers: “The advances in AI in the past six months have been enormous. The next six months will be even bigger. Conversations we have today aren't going to be true in six months.”What won’t change, however, is the hacker’s essential mind, which Reman admits has always been part of him: “I have always looked at everything as: ‘What else can I do with this?’”“That’s totally the hacker mindset,” replies Schneier. “I don't think you can train that. I think that is something you either are or are not.”Host: Macy DonawayEngineer: Kyp PilalasProducer: Ken Gordon
When it comes to artificial intelligence, how responsible is the financial services industry? How responsible must it be? And how what steps should it take to get there? These are the sort of questions Alex Jimenez, EPAM’s Managing Principal of Financial Services Consulting, is asking of Kathryn “Kate” Hughes, our Director of LegalTech and ERM Business Consulting, in this #TakeItToTheBank conversation. Hughes says that many financial firms have long invested in AI and they’re “starting to see a level of incremental benefit from AI.” She mentions a tool called ChatGPT—you might have heard about it—and says that people have been looking for a “sweet spot of a scenario or a use case” and that ChatGPT “hit it out of the park.”Jimenez notes that while it’s good to invest in AI, it’s important to view it realistically. “ChatGPT is not built to be to be replacing a call center,” he says. “It's not built to replace the advice from your licensed advisor or from your banker or from your accountant.”The pair have both tested ChatGPT, and quickly found some limits. Jimenez recently asked it about himself. “It invented a whole biography, he says. “It talked about my life and how I lived in San Francisco and how I did all these things, which are not real. And then when I asked for the sources, the sources were made-up as well.” Hughes recently asked the AI about her pension. “It gave me a really good overview of the United States pension system but did not in any way actually answer my question.”Hughes wisely argues for a measured approach to AI. “I think we have to be adults when engaging this technology,” she says. “One of the finest ways to engage AI is to think about it as a co-collaborator… rather than think of it as some, you know, alien other, and to sort of bring it into the mix.”Risk is, obviously, a big issue here. “Banks need to start thinking about how they manage the risks around AI,” says Jimenez, and he warns against the danger of “digital redlining,” which is when “the data that we're using is biased and now the decisions that the AI is doing are biased as well.”Hughes speaks about the guidelines proposed by the Wolfsberg Group and the proposed legislation for the EU harmonization of AI regulation, which call for things like ensuring that there is a legitimate purpose, making sure that there is accountability and oversight, openness and transparency built in.Guidelines are great but the big question remains: How to move FS toward AI responsibility? Hughes says there are two paths. The first involves insuring “that the organization has its own governance and policy, brand reputation and ethic.” The second path involves education. Hughes recommends reading about the proposal for harmonized rules for AI across the EU, the Algorithmic Accountability Act, and the AI Bill of Rights and notes organizations should start familiarizing themselves “with the actual content of these proposed legislative items.” Right now, it’s time to familiarize yourself with the full Silo Busting conversation. Get clicking! Host: Alison KotinEngineer: Kyp PilalasProducer: Ken Gordon
Not soccer teams: SOC teams. When we say SOC, we’re talking, of course, about the Security Operation Center, a group charged with monitoring, detecting, preventing, and responding to cybert threats. In this #CybersecurityByDesign conversation Michael Mumcuoglu, CEO and Founder of CardinalOps, Sam Rehman, EPAM’s Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, and Aviv Srour, our Head of Cyber Innovation, illustrate the term with vivid examples and relevant, up-to-the-minute details. The big challenge is the ever-increasing complexity of our digital systems. “The rate of tech adoption in the business and the evolving threat landscape are basically outpacing the SOC,” says Mumcuoglu. He says that SOC teams are involved in “a constant chase trying to catch up with all that change.”Education is a constant for the SOC team. “With every new tool and with every new technology, that team needs to have now subject matter experts in really have a huge range of technologies,” Mumcuoglu says.Part of the issue involves rules. “I have seen many incidents which could have been easily prevented with the proper rules,” says Srour. The three cyber experts talk about collecting logs, blind spots, staying up-to-date and handling the burden of false positives. Rehman says that for most CISOs, “the abundance of white noise” would not just cause a capacity problem, but would “numb the system down, meaning your teams would now no longer have the right awareness of what is really an anomaly, what is really odd, what is really something that requires investigation. That abundance of white noise actually would kill your system.”In other words: SOC today is anything but a game. It’s serious business. Learn what it takes to train your team from some veteran players. Host: Alison KotinEngineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
There's value—business value—lodged in the cloud! But to begin releasing this value, a shift in mindset is required. Organizations need to understand that cloud isn't just for IT people but for business leaders seeking to create an adaptive organization and apply the idea of composable business. Cloud is essential for creating composable business, and all it promises. In this Silo Busting conversation, Eli Feldman, EPAM's CTO of Advanced Technology, says: "Cloud service providers are API providers and this is fundamental in understanding that new ways of working." He talks about how cloud can help business "evolve its capabilities very rapidly, repackage them constantly to meet customer demand and IT technology." Feldman says the cloud can enable a wide variety of services and endpoints through APIs that can integrate within an overall business platform capability. His conversational partner Miha Kralj, EPAM’s VP of Cloud Strategy, notes that cloud can give the "illusion of global omnipresence," in which business "can reach to every corner of the world, not just because cloud is everywhere, but also reach of the internet and also digital savviness of all of the modern consumers that are out there."Listen as these two experts talk about how the new cloudiness is changing the craft of modern engineering and introducing change management challenges to leadership everywhere (say Kralj: "The cheese is moving again, right?"). You don't want to just move to the cloud; you want, as Feldman says, to become the cloud. The episode will provide instructions on beginning to do so. Host: Glen GruberEngineer: Kyp PilalasProducer: Ken Gordon
Everybody's talking about generative AI and ChatGPT… but few are doing so with the clear-eyed intelligence and honesty of Sandra Loughlin, EPAM's Chief Learning Scientist, and Alexandria Diening, our Head of Research & Insights for EMEA. In this episode of Silo Busting, our conversationalists think about how to optimize this new tech and the unique environment it is creating.Loughlin says that, regarding ChatGPT, there are "people out there who wish they could turn back the clock and just bury their heads in the sand and pretend that doesn't exist. But generative AI is here, and we need to find ways to live with it and… benefit from it."She approaches the subject, she says, from three perspectives—from that of her clients, from her practice as a consultant, and as a learning scientist thinking broadly about education.Diening addresses the hype, and compares it to the speculation surrounding, say, crypto and NFTs, saying of the former: ChatGPT is already delivering tangible value.Loughlin says she was recently asked to write an article for publication, entered a query into ChatGPT, "and within, you know, 30 seconds it had come out with a full article." She found the draft wanting, of course, and then dove into editing. Loughlin notes that the software's output "lacks the nuance of critical and ethical thinking," which means that people are still very much necessary, no matter how hot the hype.She adds that this might lead to a labor market shift. "I always talk about the death of generalists when it comes to generative AI." ChatGPT could take care of the dull and repetitive work that any general practitioner can do and allow specialists to shine. Could this be a force in the return to craft? Perhaps. Of course, they both worry about generative AI feeding on polluted data sets. Loughlin says that ChatGPT might, like social media, creating echo chambers “for things that are not true but are very attractive for a lot of people.”But that’s not the only issue. Diening notes that becoming a specialist requires one to experience the "tedious task of aggregating data" and that, traditionally, one must "go through a certain amount of dull work"—like drafting and redrafting one's words, unassisted—to "sharpen yourself as a specialist." She reminds us that ChatGPT is a tool, comparing it to a calculator, saying that it "doesn't take the job away from mathematicians" but helps them crunch their complex numbers. The smart way is to look to partner with this technology rather than rival it. And that tool, Loughlin says, will ultimately be beneficial for consultants because it will optimize their work. "It's a tool… to help us shape our offerings, get more precise, and create, frankly, more value for our customers."Curious how it might help your customers? Tune in!Host: Kenji RossEngineer: Kyp PilalasProducer: Ken Gordon
Now is an odd time to be a Chief Digital Officer at a financial services organization. The Fed is fighting inflation while watching unemployment numbers. Consumer spending is in flux. Banks are still—still!—trying to figure out their budgets. With all this going on, how’s a CDO going to proceed with a big digital transformation project? That’s exactly the topic Alex Jimenez, Managing Principal, Financial Services Consulting at EPAM, is covering with our guest, Tom Novak, VP/CDO of Visions Federal Credit Union, on Silo Busting. On the latest #TakeItToTheBank dialogue, Novak is all about adhering to his central principles. “If we stick to our digital transformation objectives, this whole play of humanizing digital as we look to scale our business, there will be short-, medium- and long-term benefits to doing that, and [they] will help us navigate some of these headwinds that are happening from a macroeconomic perspective.”Jimenez notes the irony that some firms are suddenly shifting away from their digital transformation efforts to focus on creating efficiencies. “It's funny to hear some organizations that say, 'We're gonna stop doing digital transformation because we gotta be more efficient.'” The two ideas should have been part of the conversation together all along. Novak says his org will “continue to invest in digital transformation efforts and leveraging the data and insights that we get from those” because that's how “we can really propel ourselves out of the doldrums of this, let's call it a mild recession.”The conversion is centrally about cost optimization in the present and preparing for growth going forward. The insights gained from the digital transformation work, Novak says, will provide “a lot of our insights to move the business forward in the future.”Novak and Jimenez also tackle Visions' venture into crypto wallets, the importance of getting business intelligence in order, of digital account openings, and of AI and ML and personalization.Yes, people are opening more digital accounts but, says Novak: “We’re still missing out on how we can form a real relationship with that member as opposed to more of a transactional relationship.”Episode 53 is what it sounds like when two financial services pros who have, in fact, a real relationship, speak honestly and well about our current moment.Host: Alison KotinEngineer: Kyp PilalasProducer: Ken Gordon
It’s time for your authentication journey! Mandeep Khera, the Chief Marketing Officer at SecureAuth, is our guide in this #SecurityByDesign episode of Silo Busting. And Sam Rehman, EPAM’s Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, is of course on hand to pepper Khera with questions about the fascinating concept of passwordless.Khera begins with a little history—we move from plain text passwords to hashing to one-time passwords to multi-factor authentication, biometrics, and behavioral—and then concludes: “But guess what, passwords are still around and it doesn't make any sense.”The role of passwordless, Khera says, is to “clear all the friction for users and provide a lot more security.”It isn’t, of course, that simple. “A lot of people are claiming [that they are using] passwordless, but it's not quite there yet,” says Khera. The reason—the real reason—we need to evolve to a real passwordless system, Khera says, is that roughly 80% of today’s cyberattacks happen because of credentials.Together Khera and Rehman talk about identifying ourselves via our phones and physicality and the annoying friction created by passwords (“Let's just get rid of all the passwords. Let's get rid of all the friction. We just have everything we need”).The pair zero in on the idea that behavioral monitoring and analytics might provide an answer. “I kind of know what you like to talk about,” says Rehman. “If all the sudden you start talking to me about, you know, Amber Heard… I’d be like: Is this Mandeep?”It’s a fantastic conversation about how our computing future might operate. To hear it, you need only intone the famed cinematic shibboleth Klaatu barada nikto. Just kidding. You need only click Play. Happy listening!Host: Alison KotinEngineer: Kyp PilalasProducer: Ken Gordon
May we borrow your attention for a few minutes? If you have a vested interest in commercial, residential, business, and/or personal lending, pull up a chair to hear what Chris Karageuzian, CEO & Co-Founder at Help With My Loan, and Alex Jimenez, Managing Principal, Financial Services Consulting at EPAM, are saying on our latest #TakeItToTheBank conversation. The economy is getting softer but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad time for loans. According to Jimenez, some players are saying “This is actually a good time if you have the discipline” and “if you have the right team.”Karageuzian and Jimenez talk about how automation is changing the way front-end underwriting works today and tomorrow. In a time when rates and guidelines are in rapid flux, and some banks that have been in business for 30-40 years are shutting down, automation can be an important strategic advantage. “Our production is going up because a lot of people need to automate,” says Karageuzian. “They wanna move faster, they need to be able to handle the remote work.”It’s a complicated moment for banks. Karageuzian says that there's an “overflow of deals at certain banks that are staying in the market, but they need technology because they don't have the staff.”Listen as these two loan-minded interlocutors talk about FinTechs and VCs, the pandemic’s effect on commercial lending, and how salespeople can be, as Karageuzian puts it, “augmenting their talent with technology.”So lend your ear to this episode to get a better—a much better—understanding of the tech-enabled lending game.Host: Alison KotinEngineer: Kyp PilalasProducer: Ken Gordon
The cloud may have made business more flexible, but it has made security complicated. According to Jay Parikh, Co-CEO at Lacework and our guest on this #CybersecurityByDesign conversation, the cloud model “introduces a whole new set of risks that I think the industry, we all, are really trying to put our arms around.”Parikh and Sam Rehman, EPAM’s Chief Information Security Officer and SVP his conversational companion, try to figure out how stretch the arms of cybersecurity to provide an adequate defensive posture.Part of the answer is starting early. “Ideally you understand risks in your environment before they show up in production and before they impact the business,” says Parikh. “But if there are risks that do creep through into production that you're able to find and remediate them as soon as possible.”Parikh says it’s important to rethinking the way security is done “so that it's part of this move fast, this builder kind of mentality that is there in the cloud.” You need people who can build security naturally into the development process. Talent is an issue—a big one—here.“We need more builders in security,” says Rehman. “Constantly just throwing people at it is just not gonna solve it.” Parikh agrees, adding that security “has to be something that is there and it's part of the build process. It's not an after-the-build process.”Which means, of course, that you need the kind of people with the skills about capabilities for being a builder. “Finding builders, finding security expertise, is very hard these days,” says Parikh. “The demand just continues to far outstrip the supply of the talent out there.”And you do manage to bring them on board, you need to provide them with engaging work. “You don't want them to be doing repetitive, mundane things because they're not gonna be happy. Then you have a retention problem.”Listen to this episode. It’s so relevant and timely and thoughtful that retention won’t be a problem.Host: Alison KotinEngineer: Kyp PilalasProducer: Ken Gordon
“When I meet with executives at banks, every single one of them tells me that they compete by how customer-centric” they are, says Alex Jimenez, Managing Principal, Financial Services Consulting at EPAM. “They can't really verbalize what that means.”
By contrast, Frank Sorrentino, Chairman and CEO of ConnectOne Bank, our guest on this #TakeItToTheBank conversation, is quite articulate indeed.
Listen as Sorrentino and Jimenez journey into the heart of customer-centric banking.
“When we have a meeting with clients, it's not about what products and services that we have,” says Sorrentino. “It's trying to understand ‘What are they trying to do?’ before we even talk about any particular product or service.”
This kind of customer understanding will be crucial in the upcoming year. Until recently, Sorrentino, says the economy was like a “small town, Little League where everybody gets a trophy…. everybody does well and everybody's rewarded and every decision you make happens to be the right one.” He adds: “We're now moving into an economy where I believe discipline is gonna matter. Intelligent choices are gonna matter. And I think there will be winners and losers.”
They go on to discuss important subjects such as the impact of digital technology and humanizing the digital experience, the role of the branch, how companies can optimize their activities in an uncertain economy, and more.
This episode, it must be added, features only winners.
Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Insurance and cybersecurity have a lot in common. They are both highly relevant and profoundly misunderstood and need spokespeople who can explain—clearly—how they function. Fortunately, we have two people on this #CybersecurityByDesign episode of Silo Busting who understand the worlds very well: Lynn Rivenburgh, VP of Business Consulting at EPAM, and Sam Rehman, EPAM’s Chief Information Security Officer and SVP. “Cyber and insurance are always the same in the sense that people don't care about [them] until something bad happens,” says Rehman.
It’s a tricky time for the insurance industry, says Rivenburgh. Rates have increased significantly. “For the top 25% of companies out there, it's been an increase of more than 80% and that's happening regardless of the industry that those companies are in or the size of the organization,” says Rivenburgh. She says that in order to mitigate risk, companies are “putting in place some parameters and preventive measures that if the companies, if their clients don't abide by those, they're going to see premiums in excess of 300%.”
But that’s not the only challenge insurers face. There are escalating ransomware attacks and the potential of a recession. Insurance has a lot to protect—and they’re not alone. “We're all relying heavily on digital much more than before, which is great,” says Rehman, adding: “The side effect is that we have a much wider attack surface now.”
Rivenburgh says when the insurance industry wrote its initial policies 20 years ago, they weren’t “anticipating some of the activities that we're seeing today.” Soon, she says, “There are gonna be some new regulations, in particular in the EU and UK,” and “companies will be obliged to have independent third-party assessments and infrastructure assessments obtained.”
Together they discuss this complex moment, in which insurers are moving toward a more optimized mode and adopting a more conservative outlook on growth, how legislation and regulation will help assess where risk is, and the challenges regarding insurance’s talent pool.
Much is said about how partnerships can help companies lower their risk profiles. Rehman says: “Partnership is so important because no one single company can really cover” the multiple aspects of cybersecurity and notes that we’re seeing more cyber-savvy boards. The key is “a defensive culture around security.” If that is a central part of your culture, he says, “then everything else would tend to fall in place.”
Want to understand more about the area where insurance and cyber overlap? Listening to Silo Busting is the best policy.
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
So what’s in your mobile wallet? Questions around digital payments are on the minds of our two guests on this #TakeItToTheBank episode of Silo Busting. Chase Petrey, COO of Pi, and Alex Jimenez, Managing Principal, Financial Services Consulting at EPAM, talk—with great gusto—about real-time payments, data complexity and scale, the evolution of fraud risk monitoring, embedded finance, “fast fraud,” and bias in AI and machine learning.
The digital payment world has a fascinating history, one in which India has led the way. The US built a lot of the foundational infrastructure in the 60s and 70s and, according to Petrey: “We're still using those systems today because there's so much process built around those systems that, you know doing a rip and replace is just untenable.” But when it comes to digital payment innovation, he says, some booming BRIC economies are “really able to leapfrog the United States,” because they get to work on a “blue sky blank canvas with the luxury of current-day technology.”
Digital payments, our interlocutors note, require an enormous amount of computing power, even for something as straightforward as mobile check deposits. “The computing power to maintain all those aggregations at every customer level is insane,” says Petrey. “It's not just averages across the whole business, but it's averages at the individual member or customer level being computed in that moment.”
If you want to hear some fascinating about talk about financial services risk management and bringing what Petrey calls “the right friction to the right person,” then you’ve in the appropriate place. There is, in fact, nothing average about this conversation. And the transaction costs for listening? Zero!
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Loyalty: It ain’t what it used to be. The customers of 2022 are much (much, much) more demanding than customers used to be. Not only that, when their high expectations aren’t met, they’ll let the world know all about it, which can quickly degrade a brand. Which is why Pierre Kremer, Senior Director, Retail & CPG, Digital Engagement Practice EMEA at EPAM, and Chris Hosmer, our Managing Principal, Experience Consulting, are here—to parse what customer loyalty means right now.
Kremer says that customers don’t just want to accumulate points—though there is still interest here—but that they say: “I wanna be part of something. I wanna be part of your brand. I wanna join the community.”
But the nature community itself has changed in our digital age. Hosmer notes that Starbucks' just-launched Odyssey Program is “an extension of their Starbucks Rewards” as well as “the first notable example of Web3 and NFT being integrated with the loyalty program of this size and scale.”
The guys make all kinds of good points: about measuring—really measuring—emotional loyalty, the duality of loyalty (experience-based vs score-keeping), airline miles, the peculiar loyalties of cult brands, and more.
And, as a bonus, they’ve included a tantalizing thought experiment into their dialogue. Got your own favorite loyalty program? Join Kremer and Hosmer and ask yourself: How would that brand do if you removed the loyalty program?
Tune in to discover their answers on the latest episode of Silo Busting. It’s a conversation that remains loyal to our usual high standards. Listen!
Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Home, they used to say, is where the heart is. Now it’s also where people do an enormous amount of shopping. We learned all about this in the most recent installment of our Consumers Unmasked report, and our experts—Jen Jones, the Chief Marketing Officer at commercetools, and Mario Crippa, Head of the Physical Experience Practice EMEA at EPAM Continuum—employ these insights to fuel an animated conversation with Resonance Test producer Ken Gordon.
The group talks about a number of relevant issues including how small local retailers are transitioning in the post-pandemic world. “Many local retailers built strong relationships with their customers and their communities throughout the pandemic,” says Jones adding that they must be sure to “build on that and extend that relationship into our post-pandemic world” because “We all know that consumers have very short memories.”
This is seconded by Crippa, who says that after the pandemic, “We all need a little a little bit of human touch, some human contact,” and that small local business are well-positioned to reach out. They definitely have the ability “to come up with better propositions or sharper positions,” to “show off their values, what they believe in.”
As an example, Jones talks about a local restaurant that sold curbside family pickup meals during the pandemic: ”They've sort of shifted that to a pick-up-on-your-way-home-from-work [offering] and have a nicely prepared meal with instructions.”
Jones and Crippa think through the falling value of being able to physically view products.
Crippa says “the entire way to create desire has changed,” with the advent of product drops and the continuous digital campaigns consumers encounter. “People just click ‘buy.’ They feel like they're missing out, so they buy. They buy immediately.”
Jones suggests that smart online retailers employ a combination of “emerging technologies, which are continuing to improve and evolve, plus great customer service” and that together this “can basically eliminate the need to see something in person.”
The conversation also looks at how Amazon—“one of the very few companies that is basically a bank of consumers desires,” Crippa says—has been approaching home shopping (“They're testing, testing, testing to see what sticks and then rolling it out to a bigger market,” says Jones).
They even touch on gaming. Says Jones: “people are leaving their houses again doing other things like concerts and travel; that would take you away from being at home gaming.”
So many insights, at no cost to you! Bring them into your home. Just hit “play.”
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
When you think of the term “mergers” what comes next? “Acquisitions,” of course! But what follows after that? How about… “cybersecurity”? Does that concept immediately pop to mind when thinking about M&A?
According to the latest #CybersecurityByDesign episode of Silo Busting, it should—but perhaps this isn’t always the case. Listen as Sam Rehman, EPAM’s Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, interrogates Sobhith Grandhi, our Head of Technology for M&A, and Adam Bishop, our Director of Information Security, about cyber in the M&A era.
The conversation centers on explaining to organizations that, as Rehman says, “cyber should be a first-class citizen during your deal flow.”
Grandhi notes how much risk and uncertainty are involved in M&A situations, and how this creates opportunities for cybercriminals.
“You get an e-mail that says, ‘Hey, revised org chart, please review ASAP.’ You're gonna open that attachment,” says Bishop. This is the kind of situation that attackers “prey on and count on.” They use the uncertainty of M&A to “prey on the human as the weakest link in the chain.”
If you and your organization want an expert view on M&A risk factors, what the cybersecurity process looks like, the challenges of integration and evaluation, and more—this is an episode you’ll want to download. The risk, it turns out, is not listening.
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
This time, it’s personal. Welcome to the premier installment of #TakeItToTheBank, our new series of financial services conversations on Silo Busting. In this episode, Liz High, co-author of Think like a Brand, Not a Bank: 5 Practical Strategies to Unlock Innovation, Connect with Customers, and Grow, and Alex Jimenez, Managing Principal, Financial Services Consulting at EPAM, get into how banks do, and should, approach personalization.
High says that banks need to do a better job of understanding that “brands and the customer experiences you build have to feel personal” and that banks shouldn’t be customer-first. “If your decision-making framework is either bank first or customer first, you're never gonna get to [a] fair exchange of value,” she says, “because no [one element is] more important than the other.”
Jimenez notes that even when banks go to market with a customer-first message, “ROI is always going to come first, despite the mission being all about the customer or all about the member.”
Together the note that lifecycle and lifestyle marketing isn’t personalization. When banks try to sell mortgages to 21-year-olds there’s a disconnect because, as Jimenez says: “You're not doing the hard work of really understanding your customer.”
The talk about the importance of using data to look forward rather than backward (“Your rear-view mirror is smaller than your windscreen for a reason,” says High, quoting her co-author) and for managerial purposes: “That mind shift needs to be throughout the organization and not just in marketing and customer service and customer experience, but it also needs to be in the back office,” Jimenez says.
They get into niche banking (did you know there’s a bank dedicated to musicians?) and analyze the evolution of community banking. High says the contemporary idea of community is about “moving away from geography and moving into emotion and moving into brand.”
If you want to spend time learning about neobanks, fintech, and charters (“the most valuable thing in that whole ecosystem is, the bank charters,” says High), then this is the conversation for you.
Now visit the link below, withdraw the conversation, and collect your dividends!
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
It’s a weird moment for fashion. Think about the refashion, digital fashion, and the challenges of brand loyalty in a complex and increasingly expensive world. What’s a fashion brand to do in the face of all this change?
Well, a smart place to start is the recently published third installment of our Consumers Unmasked research. And that’s exactly where our Resonance Test guests—Michelle Grant, Director of Strategy and Insights, Retail and Consumer Goods at Salesforce, and Pierre Kremer, Senior Director, Retail & CPG, Digital Engagement Practice EMEA at EPAM—center their conversation.
Kremer asks about brand loyalty in recessionary times and how niche companies like Allbirds can have a slightly higher price point, compared to legacy shoe companies, and still compete.
Grant points to materials as key element of innovation. She talks about cutting water usage in making denim or replicating leather with mushrooms.
“Sustainability is a really important value to Gen Z in particular, so that material innovation, where you're being as careful about environmental resources as possible, will read as it resonate with that generation,” she says.
Grant and Kremer consider many important topics: the resilience of physical retail in hybrid shopping (“Stores are well positioned you to be fulfillment centers… They're essentially mini-fulfillment centers, and in some cases,” says Grant), the current state of hyper-localization, the fashionable topic of NFTs, and more. Pull up a chair and listen as they walk their ideas down the virtual runway.
Host: Macy Donaway Engineer: Kip Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Cloudy with a strong chance of organizational change. That’s the forecast for just about every business right now.
The cloud brings both great promise and the potential for disruption. Sadly, few companies understand how to prepare their IT ecosystems for such a storm of transformation. Luckily for them, our guests on Silo Busting, Miha Kralj, EPAM’s VP of Cloud Strategy, and Sandra Loughlin, our Chief Learning Scientist, are here to speak about what takes to master cloud operating models.
Loughlin defines a cloud operating model as “a mental checklist of all of the things that need to be considered and addressed when making substantive changes to how your organization operates. So this is, very simply put: people, process, tools, and data.”
Kralj, who tells Loughlin he prefers “real operating systems instead of buggy human operating systems that you are expert in,” says an operating model is “the way how you run IT. It's a definition of business of IT inside an enterprise.”
Together they put the idea of the cloud operating model through its paces. They call about how cloud has brought IT back in-house… and about the complexity of factoring human employees into the equation. They talk about matching new skills to business needs and growing and training cloud-era IT talent.
“How are we helping organizations to go from front-of-the-conveyor belt, blue-collar workers, to become actual knowledge workers in this new IT operator model?” asks Kralj.
Loughlin responds by talking about automation, employees, skills and skill gaps, career paths, and more.
This episode will instruct you about two-speed IT (“It might be easy to think in terms of that dichotomy, but in terms of an actual application and real-world practice, it's not a good thing at all,” says Loughlin) and the challenges of helping companies manage the transition from legacy to cloud systems.
Stick around until the end you’ll hear our duo’s best practical tips for dealing with what Kralj calls the “never-ending continuous change cycle that is ahead of us.”
Host: Macy Donaway Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
“I have always looked at a safe environment as part of what needs to be in a healthy environment,” says Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, on the latest #CybersecurityByDesign conversation.
To which Michelle Dennedy, CEO of PrivacyCode, co-author of The Privacy Engineer's Manifesto, and our latest podcast guest, responds:
I love what you're saying, Sam. You want your family, you want your co-workers, you want your life to be safe and secure. Well, the best way to do that of course is to dig a bunker. But if you want them to live and you want your kids to leave the nest and forge out it, it involves risks…. It involves human interaction and learning the skills to be resilient when you're talking to other people who are also not living in their bunkers.
This episode is a fortunate and enlightening meeting of the minds. Dennedy and Rehman talk through what it means to consider privacy and security in the context of ESG.
Dennedy, the former Chief Privacy Officer at Cisco, defines privacy with lawyerly precision as “the authorized processing of personal or personally identifiable information according to moral, ethical, legal, and sustainable principles.”
She encourages board members and CEOs to ask themselves questions such as: “Are we choosing to protect stories, data, artifacts, about the human beings with whom we're interacting, whether they're your employee, or your customer?”
Together they talk about the importance of bringing the human factor into ESG conversations.
Says Rehman: “If you look at data just as data—It's a database, it's a file, what do I care, I'm just gonna churn it”—that's not how things are, and you know that. People know that.”
It’s a lively dialogue that swerves into the topic of the emotion of security and governance in the era of non-stop WFH video conferencing (Dennedy raises the issues this way: “What does it mean to my workforce, if they can work securely anywhere they are? Does that change the character of the data about them that's coming in through all of these channels?”). Listen to discover the many new questions business leaders are asking, what wicked privacy is all about, and more.
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
If you have a child (a young sibling, cousin, student, or even friend) in your life, chances are you know about Scratch—the wildly popular graphical program language that kids use to dream up interactive stories, games, and animations. But it’s entirely possible you don’t know the man behind Scratch, Mitch Resnick, the LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Lab, or that the Scratch Foundation has a strong, long-term relationship with EPAM. After listening to the latest iteration of The Resonance Test, in which Resnick and Shamilka Samarasinha, EPAM’s Global Head of Corporate Social Responsibility, answer questions from producer Ken Gordon, that ignorance will instantly evaporate.
The episode digs into the reasons why Scratch is, and always has been, a free program (“We didn't want there to be barriers for young people to get access to Scratch,” says Resnick) and how Scratch helped children during Covid (the first year of the pandemic saw the number of Scratch projects double and the number of comments the kids wrote on each other’s projects increase fivefold).
You’ll hear about Scratch and the kids of Ukraine. Says Resnick: “In early March, 10 days after the invasion of Ukraine, I got a message from an educator in Ukraine named Olesia Vlasii.” Vlasii had the idea to use Scratch to create what she called Waves of Kindness. The result: A Waves of Kindness gallery on the Scratch website “where kids from around the world could upload projects about how you could spread kindness,” says Resnick. Within days, Waves of Kindness featured “literally thousands of projects from kids around the world.”
The conversation also touches on how Scratch engages a wide ecosystem of learners to promote diversity and inclusion in expanding education and how EPAM’s partnership with Scratch fits into our other ESG activities. “In the social impact space, obviously education is one of our core areas,” says Samarasinha.
Finally, Resnik and Samarasinha talk about the evolving relationship between the Scratch Foundation and EPAM—our EPAM E-Kids program has expanded from four to 19 countries—and the upcoming virtual Scratch Conference.
It’s a conversation that your kid will want you to hear. So listen!
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Last time on Silo Busting, Dr. Alexandra Diening, EPAM’s Head of Research & Insights for EMEA, introduced us to the concept of the responsible metaverse. This time, she turns the virtual tables and interrogates Jonathan Lupo, EPAM Continuum’s VP of Experience Design, about his own experience as a responsible designer.
Lupo, who was in Covid quarantine during the recording of this episode, says that the metaverse provides “distraction therapy—I need to escape the bedroom” and then reaches, empathically, beyond his own experience: “But there are patients who need to escape a hospital.”
He says that being trapped in his bedroom with VR has been “both a blessing and a curse,” but this made him realize that “our point of origin is kind of all messed up when it comes to metaverse thinking and really dissimilar to how we envision great customer experiences. Which is: We start with a problem.”
Another issue: The metaverse requires designers to evolve to a 3D mindset. Lupo talks of the presence of 2D paradigms in contemporary VR experiences, adding that these “screen-based paradigms shoved in there don't feel right.”
Of course, because we’re bringing humans into deeply immersive experiences, a lot is at stake, and this is reflected in Lupo’s general ethos: “To me, the guiding experience principle when designing for VR or 3D is: How do we keep people safe?” He’s rightly concerned with making sure people are guided properly and carefully through virtual worlds, how to avoid making them sick, how to ensure that they feel in control of their own movement. “How do we provide a set of physics that the user understands?”
Listen and learn about the new skills involved in designing the metaverse—and when organizations can do quick upskilling or when they need perhaps to think about acquisition.
Often, Lupo says, companies are focused on creating the ideal future state, but when it comes to the metaverse, he suggests the responsible thing also requires companies to “envision the worst experience that could happen, what could go wrong” and then “safeguard around that.”
The metaverse is a brand-new, brave new world, and Lupo sums up his honest feelings here, saying that it’s “exciting, exhilarating, thrilling, and terrifying to me.”
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
“I rebel, therefore we exist,” wrote Albert Camus in 1951. Céline Schillinger, Founder and CEO of We Need Social, writes in her new volume, Dare to Un-Lead. The Art of Relational Leadership in a Fragmented World: “This phrase could sum up the essence of this book.” In this episode of The Resonance Test, Schillinger and Producer Ken Gordon talk it through.
Schillinger believes conventional leadership’s day is over and that relational leadership is the way forward. “I think we've lost sight of just very basic values that make people thrive and excel, which are related to freedom and equality among people and a sense of chosen togetherness,” she says.
She understands what it’s like to operate in corporate culture. Schillinger was a self-propelled change agent at Sanofi (“My entry point into active positive rebellion was the fight for a greater diversity in the workplace”) and has taken her experiences, mixed them with some wide-ranging reading, and developed a philosophy of leadership structured on the famed Gallic triumvirate of liberté, égalité, and fraternité.
In the conversation, Schillinger talks about the challenges of making her kind of change in big organizations. It isn’t, interestingly, a business issue but a cultural one. “It's very easy to make the business case. That's the easiest part, I would say.” The truly difficult part? Getting leaders accept the risk, she says.
The conversation is lively and anything but stiff. Schillinger is as happy talking about how people have misread W. Edwards Deming as she is criticizing... performance evaluations.
“You don’t like them; I don’t like them,” says Gordon of evals.
“I hate them,” says Schillinger, adding: “No one ever questions the fundamental idea at the core of this.”
She suggests that a company’s time and resources would be much better spent “if instead we got together as a team and evaluated our system [asking]: How do we work together? What is the quality of our collective work, and how can we make it better?”
Schillinger talks about both the value of networks and her skepticism toward today’s social networks. She even gives some useful career advice to all the change-agents and would-be change agents out there.
We’re pretty sure that you’ll relate.
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
The metaverse business is booming! Companies are scrambling into the virtual world to claim a space of their own and set up shop as fast as they can. Dr. Alexandra Diening, Head of Research & Insights for EMEA, says they need to slow down. She introduces our Jonathan Lupo, VP of Experience Design, in the latest episode of Silo Busting, to a powerful and relevant idea she calls the “responsible metaverse.” Diening talks about the metaverse “opens new pathways for potential risks” and what we can do to close them off. Learn about the new vulnerabilities the metaverse crease (social, phycological, data and more) and Diening’s plan to gather a diverse community to co-create the necessary guardrails. “I always say that it takes a village to build a responsible metaverse.” If you’d like to be a virtual villager, let's talk.
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Nowadays, everyone in healthcare is talking telemedicine… except for maybe Dr. Bryan Vartabedian, Chief Medical Officer of Texas Children's Hospital North Austin, founder of 33 Charts, author of several books, and a previous Resonance Test guest, who prefers the term “remote care.” He finds it a flexible term because it encompasses more than the conventional idea of care through a screen. One can certainly provide remote care via phone call, text, or email.
“It’s important to think about the different modalities of remote care because different circumstances call for different modalities,” Vartabedian tells our Jonathon Swersey on the latest episode of The Resonance Test.
But the challenge is not just about the varieties of treatment—there’s also the matter of training. Vartabedian says “We have this embarrassment of riches of technology,” adding that much of this tech is doled out to providers “without any real instruction or discussion or dialogue about how we're going to use these tools.”
Problems arise when providers use “the wrong tool for the wrong problem” and “things get really kind of challenging and difficult.”
And let’s not get started on the data! “There's this constant stream of information, and the challenge for us is: How do we harness that? How do we consolidate that to certain times of the day? It's almost a design problem,” Vartabedian says, sounding very much like a designer.
This fine conversation skis around the idea of data governance, training patients to use MyChart messaging, the difficulty of setting universal standards for communication tools. They talk about what’s been gained (access) and lost (human connection) in a remote-first world. They talk about being sensitive to the interests of the end user. They talk about the importance of touch in the examination process: “It's a form of communication,” says Vartabedian.
It's a deep, informed, and at times personal conversation about how going remote has changed the face of healthcare for practitioners. Get close to their dialogue by clicking below.
Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
The smartest designers understand the importance of diversity. It’s not about signaling openminded-ness but about achieving the deepest levels of innovation. We’re talking about truly heterogenous, multidisciplinary teams, which is a familiar concept to us. “Imagine if our future teams were just as representative as the beautiful tapestry of people making up this world,” writes Kevin G. Bethune, author of Reimagining Design: Unlocking Strategic Innovation, in his recently published volume.
But when it comes to investing in such diversity, Bethune, who is our guest on The Resonance Test, tells Producer Ken Gordon: “The business community at large has a long way to go.”
Bethune knows whereof he speaks. He’s been around all kinds corporate and design cultures. He studied engineering at Notre Dame, business at Carnegie Mellon, and design at ArtCenter; worked on nuclear generators at Westinghouse; designed shoes at Nike; lead design at BCG Digital Ventures; and most recently became the Founder and Chief Creative Officer of dreams • design + life, a think tank for design and innovation.
His book is, in fact, an interesting hybrid of professional autobiography, an argument for inclusion, a little philosophy of multidisciplinary design teams, and a career guide. And in it, and in this conversation, he uses his lived experience to showcase how an incessant willingness to learn, to stretch, are necessary for a successful career.
“Careers are made by really leaning into your curiosity,” he says.
But Bethune also says, in his book on this conversation, that this individual experience needs to be blended into a strong multidisciplinary team. “The collective we is better,” he says, because it creates “a greater sense of resilience, greater sense of flexibility, and a greater sense of future foresight than if I didn't have these experiences to offer in the team room.”
In fact, Bethune talks about so much relevant things, such as the important role education played in his career, collaboration during a pandemic, and how to create a network of your own, among other salient topics.
Much wisdom here, for those who click. Join us.
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Virtual confusion has been wafting through the 21st century c-suite. Leaders are asking: Web3? Metaverse? What’s the relationship between the two… and how will it affect our business? They are frantically trying to sort out the nuances.
Are you perhaps such a leader? If so, you’re in luck: We’ve captured a conversation between Alexandra "Sasha" Pitkevich, EPAM’s Blockchain Lead, and Cristina Garcés, CEO of Optiva Media, an EPAM company, that will put the issue into a proper context for you and your organization.
In this episode of Silo Busting, Producer Ken Gordon put some queries to our experts and their answers, delivered in clear, human-centered language, provide an inside look into what clients know, and need to know, about Web3 and the metaverse.
For Pitkevich, much of the confusion is a matter of “bad timing, coincidence, because both terms appeared in the market at the same time.” Part of it is a lack of digital and technological experience. Many people, says Garcés, haven't ever pulled on a VR headset and don't understand the metaverse as “somewhere where they're going to explore, experiment, socialize.”
Pitkevitch says that it may be a literary issue, citing Neal Stephenson’s use of the term “metaverse” in Snow Crash. For some sci-fi fans, the concept “came not from the reality but from the books.”
Plug into their conversation and you’ll learn why a virtual standalone community is not a metaverse, hear about the new vulnerabilities of the metaverse, and consider the issues around data sharing and intellectual property rights. You’ll ponder the central concept of interoperability and dare to think of the pivotal role of community managers (Pitkevitch says of metaverse use cases: “They lace in between brands, they lace in between business units, and they're powered by the community interaction”).
This bold, borderless episode will get you ready for a bold, borderless future. Don’t fret; just listen.
Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Passwords are a hassle. But what would it take to live a secure online life without them?
This is what Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, and Shaked Vax, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Anonybit, talk about in our latest #CybersecurityByDesign conversation.
Listen as they jam on the topic of zero trust and identity as it relates to relevant and tricky ideas such as passwordless technology and biometrics.
There are some issues, says Vax, explaining that relying on the biometrics enrolled on one’s smartphone “creates a bit of a false sense of security, in my opinion.” Those biometrics, he says, are “not validated against who they belong to.” Because one can store other fingerprints—those of, say, one’s kids—on a smartphone, this creates “a gap there between the account holder and the biometric on the phone.”
There are flaws, Vax says, when the system is not fully connected to a centralized authentication and relies too heavily on phone biometrics.
“You truly want to identify and bind that to the end user,” says Rehman, meaning a very specific person and “not just somebody who can unlock the phone.”
The big question for Vax is: “How do you do a multi-factor authentication that addresses this gap, this vulnerability around the new phone or the account recovery?”
Some fascinating talk here about decentralized data storage and protection, the user experience of passwordless, and the importance of having multiple modalities for different populations.
You’ll want to listen—and you’ll be glad that no password is required.
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Are you SME paring? That is, are you matching up external cloud subject matter experts with your engineers, architects, and security people to deliver a common goal? That’s what Jim Wilt, Distinguished Architect of Digital Strategy & Technology Innovation at a Fortune 100 retailer, does—and it works. Superbly. “The rate at which you increase expertise at that level is tenfold greater than an encompassing program of certification and training,” he says.
If you’re curious about the cloud, you should attend to the wisdom of Wilt, Miha Kralj, EPAM’s VP of Cloud Strategy, and Norm Judah, EPAM Advisory Board Member, who are all here on Silo Busting for the second installment of our series on cloud mastery (hear the first part here: https://www.continuuminnovation.com/en/how-we-think/blog/you-only-realize-when-you-finish-the-marathon-that-its-actually-a-triathlon).
It’s a wisdom, says Judah, that is evolving—and one that leaders shouldn’t keep to themselves: “One of the key measures of wisdom is your ability to share the wisdom that you've got and update the wisdom that you have.”
And it’s one that requires specific measures of success.
When Kralj asks about defining the cloud native mentality approach and results, he gets an interesting answer from Judah: “What is the consequence of mastery?” adding: “A consequence of mastery is actually a clearly articulated technical strategy on which we actually land up building and running a series of systems in a fairly broad way.”
Listen in to this episode and you’ll walk away with all sorts of cloud-based wisdom including advice on identifying and encouraging technical leaders within one’s organization, some insights into investment strategy, and a deep consideration of the role of the CTO in the complex process of cloud mastery.
Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
For many organizations, the cloud is shrouded in mystery. It doesn’t have to be. Cloud mastery isn’t out of reach, but achieving it requires clear thinking, a tolerance for systemic complexity, and a willingness to invest and test.
Our latest episode of Silo Busting—the first in a two-part series—will help prepare you to scale the cloud’s intimidating edifice. To ascend to a higher level of understanding, listen to the informed but easygoing back-and-forth between experts Jim Wilt, Distinguished Architect of Digital Strategy & Technology Innovation at a Fortune 100 retailer promoting cloud-native solutions via empowered DevSecOps teams; Norm Judah, EPAM Advisory Board Member; and Miha Kralj, EPAM’s VP of Cloud Strategy.
Know first that humility is required. “It is absolutely impossible to know everything about everything in the cloud,” admits Judah. “You can know something about everything, and everything about something, but knowing how all the components work is a task that's sort of intractable to normal humans.”
And yet, normal humans—particularly those on the IT side of things—need to explain to their business counterparts that, as Kralj puts it: “Cloud is not just a cheaper data center in the sky but actually provides, on its own, an additional business value through greater agility, greater speed, better access to business innovation.”
Part of the reason we can move so quickly in cloud is that today’s technology enables rapid experimentation and fast learning. Says Wilt: “I'm learning one hundred ways to not do something so that when I find the two ways to do it, I can go into that with high confidence because I'm an expert at failing at it.”
The trio riffs on how the cloud got so complex, the need for continuous education, the importance of aligning technical and business mastery, and more.
If you're curious about cloud, get listening! As Judah says, cloud mastery “isn't static—you either get better or you get worse, but you never stay at the same level.”
Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
“Zero trust to me is a set of principles, and the degree to which you operate those principles is very much a risk-management exercise,” says Mike Gorman, Head of Security and Compliance at NetFoundry.
This remark set the tone for the informed dialogue Gorman recently had with Boris Khazin, our Global Head of DRM Services, in our latest #CybersecurityByDesign conversation.
The environment that requires zero-trust networking, Gorman says, is complex. “The more we advance the information age, the more we are struggling to get ahold of our security and the more we are struggling to reach the kind of business agility that we want and all of these competing factors.”
Listen to Gorman-Kahzin back-and-forth as it ranges from GDPR and CCPA, to improving the implementation of private networks, to including GRC within the software development lifecycle and the solution development lifecycle.
These are essential topics that all businesses need to address, whether they recognize the need or not.
“Vulnerabilities always exist,” says Gorman. “If you don't know about them, then there's a zero-day out there [and] some security researcher, good or bad, is gonna find it for you.”
One way to combat the bad guys: Get into the network early and protect it. “By getting the networking piece right, you can reduce the threat actor space by literally orders of magnitude,” says Gorman.
Want to start making your organization less vulnerable? Hit “play.”
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
It’s 2022: Are you ready to jump on a plane? Are your customers? What might it take to make all of us comfortable with the idea of traveling, once again, across the globe? We’ve been thinking about such questions because we’ve been prompted by the insights from Consumers Unmasked: Stage 2, part of our longitudinal, international research initiative. In this episode of The Resonance Test, Jasmin Guthmann, Senior Director of Global Partner Marketing at Contentstack and Daniel Smythe, Vice President of Retail & Hospitality Consulting for EPAM Continuum, sojourn deep into the topic of contemporary travel. Guthmann herself admits that it’s a tense moment for travel: “I've just come off my first long haul flight myself and the level of anxiety added is incredible.” To offset this, she says, the travel industry must provide “as much certainty as possible.”
But the travel challenges aren’t just about pandemic fear and uncertainty; they also include economics. Learning that 44% of Consumers Unmasked respondents said they couldn't afford a vacation, Guthmann said: “That's pretty dire,” adding: “I don't think discounts will be the way to go” and that young travel customers “need highly attractive offers,” personalized and customized offers, at “the right price for what [they] want.”
Together, Guthmann and Smythe talk intelligently about taking customer experience seriously, the personalization tech can play, staycations and remote work, the importance of privacy for today’s travelers, and travel must do to attain, especially for young customers, “that more playful vibe again.”
Host: Macy Donaway Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Every organization has silos—even ours. But EPAM’s culture is unique in that it allows, even encourages, individuals to disregard silos, take initiative, and connect deeply with others. Lynn Rivenburgh, a VP of Business Consulting at EPAM, is a superb practitioner of silo busting, and in this episode of Silo Busting, she talks producer Ken Gordon through her process.
While interviewing, Rivenburgh, who was hired in June 2021, asked her interlocutors whom she should connect, and after collective some relevant names: “I did reach out to people on LinkedIn [and] they were super receptive.” Since then, she built on this networking and set up monthly meetings with a number of organizational leaders.
Listen and learn about her work with the Women’s Circle, a self-regulated, cross-functional EPAM community: “It's different people all over the organization, at different levels, and [colleagues] not within my practice necessarily, which has been great.” Rivenburgh has enjoyed Circle life—whose Circle is one of eight—because it opens a window into “other parts of the org and how they operate.” The Circle clearly provides much psychological safety (“Whatever is said in the group stays in the group; it’s confidential,” says says) and builds a terrific amount of trust. Her group includes a man, who happens to be the person to whom she reports.
Mentorship junior practitioners is a big theme for Rivenburgh. “I think it's not just it's not just the most important thing I do on a daily basis, but I think it's the most rewarding as well,” she says, adding: “My job is to find my successor so I can elevate myself personally within my career.”
When Rivenburgh talks about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion work or her—and her six-year-old daughter’s involvement—in the EPAM eKids program https://www.epam.com/careers/blog/learning-from-scratch (“They're reaching out to millions and millions of kids across the globe; the breadth and depth of what they've done from programming language is absolutely incredible, “) you’ll be inspired.
In terms of advice for listeners and colleagues: Rivenburgh suggests we willingly banish themselves from the comfort zone and learn to become better networkers and listeners.
She concludes with some words about how all her internal networked applies to the outside world as well. She’s insurance expert, she says, but “I'm not a cloud expert, not necessarily a data analytics and predictive modeling expert.” But because she has a great internal network, “I'm able to bring those resources to the table with me to have those conversations with clients.”
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Data: Organizations have an incessant demand for it, in order to operate and innovate—but at the same time, gathering and analyzing all this data creates legitimate privacy concerns. This is what John Reardon, VP & Senior Director of Global Risk Solutions Technology at Liberty Mutual Insurance, calls the data paradox, and he talks about it on our latest episode of The Resonance Test. Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, poses some questions to Reardon and Val Tsitlik, EPAM’s Head of Big Data Practice and VP of Technology Solutions, about how the data paradox works in their worlds.
Together this data-wise trio talks through the nuances of the data paradox. It’s fascinating in that they chat not just about, say, the relevance of anonymization but the idea of synthetic data (a generated data set that matches the semantics of an actual real data set).
Rehman says to Tsitlik that synthetic data allows for testing more closely to real-life scenarios and Tsitlik replies: “I'm almost thinking of this as creating a Sims world”—almost, but not quite, starting a conversation about the metaverse.
Listen and learn about data governance in our ever-growing regulatory environment (“It may feel counterintuitive that governance can equal acceleration, but in this space it actually is a key enabler,” says Reardon), tooling (“People always say it's not about the tool, but anybody that actually ever tried to fell a tree with a pocket knife before could tell you sometimes it is about the tool,” notes Rehman), and the always-relevant topic of budgets.
Speaking of budgets, if you’re a data or security professional, open up your calendar; you’ll need set aside 30 minutes to listen to this conversation.
Host: Glenn Gruber Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
In 2022, Technology evolves fast—faster than the technologists who use it. In order for organizations to put this tech to work for them, they need to have a good understanding of the talent ecosystem, and how to work within it.
As Eli Feldman, EPAM’s CTO of Advanced Technology, says, on the latest episode of Silo Busting: “Business capabilities are evolving faster than ever and therefore the technology capabilities that support the business capabilities must keep up.”
Feldman’s interlocutor is Sandra Loughlin, Managing Principal and Head of Client Learning & Talent Enablement at EPAM, who makes the important point that companies don’t just need to keep their training their employees on new skills, they need to do so longitudinally. When it comes to the issue of developing capabilities, Loughlin says, it needs to “span entire career changes, especially as automation has changed the roles that people have” and raises the questions of “whether those roles even exist” in the future.
Back and forth, Loughlin and Feldman go, talking about the importance of training people in a way that makes sense for their business (“Getting the right content to the right people at the right time, right way,” says Loughlin) and applying it to their daily work, aligning skills strategy and capability strategy, the capability academy model, mentorship, EPAM’s learning infrastructure, our approach to assessments (Feldman says EPAM focuses “extensively on making sure that assessment is in reality all about guiding the individual toward their next milestone in their career”), and more.
Eavesdrop on Feldman and Loughlin and you’ll soon understand much about creating a healthy talent ecosystem here. Lucky for you, the learning process is as simple as hitting the “play” button.
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
The search is on! All over the internet, in conference rooms, on ill-lit Zoom calls, anxious executives are straining to understand the still-obscure concept of Web3. The term dares you to define it and to explain why organizations should care—and that’s what we're here for, on the latest episode of Silo Busting.
Our experts, Alexandra "Sasha" Pitkevich, EPAM’s Blockchain Lead, and Érica Moreti, Head of Strategy & Innovation and Physical Experience for EMEA for EPAM Continuum, answer some essential questions from Producer Ken Gordon about the technical and business implications of Web3.
They begin by building off of Gavin Wood’s famed definitional haiku: “Less trust, more truth.” Pitkevich talks about Web3 as a place “where the infrastructure and the data are owned by the creators of this infrastructure.” Moreti sees it as a “decentralized ecosystem based on the blockchain” in which platforms and apps aren’t “owned by a central gatekeeper anymore but rather by the users themselves, who would earn their ownership stake by helping develop and maintain those services.”
They dig into those often-tossed-around terms centralization and decentralization. Pitkevich says that our internet is current running on a “centralized concept, where the majority of the users are coming to one server, one database.” As for decentralization, Moreti talks about a system that’s “distributed in the homogenous way to a connected network of people and devices.”
Together, they address the confusion people have between Web3 and the metaverse. “When we're speaking about multiverse, we are speaking about a huge interactive presentation layer of internet,” says Pitkevitch, adding: “When we speak about Web3, we are speaking to the complete internet infrastructure,” in which all the layers—presentation layer, middleware, the back end—are, you guessed it, decentralized.
It’s a good, useful dialogue. Their conversation addresses the essential context around Web3: the economic implications and business opportunities, the challenges of digital identity, and the power of communities.
If you need an introduction to Web3, you must listen to these two.
Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
“Therapy is always conducted at a distance,” writes Hannah Zeavin in her original, unusual new book, The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy. The volume is an historical closeup on teletherapy, a term she defines as “those therapies facilitated by a class of techniques and tools that allow patients to communicate with clinicians or volunteers or machines, not in their physical proximity at the time of communication.” With this subject, it seemed natural for our Boston-bound producer, Ken Gordon, to record a digital, long-distance conversation with Zeavin (who spoke to us from Oakland, California).
Zeavin reports that teletherapy is hardly a new phenomenon; the first analytic encounter involved Freud himself, in his written correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess. It has, she says, “accompanied the entire history of clinical psychology in many forms.”
She catalogues the various forms of teletherapy—radio broadcasts, call-in shows, e-therapy—but insists we remember that “no matter what, communication is nearly impossible, whether it's two-way and synchronous or one-way and asynchronous, and that's really at the core of what people deal with in psychodynamic treatment.” Zeavin notes that communication issues are, generally speaking, “also what we deal with as daily habitual users of media.”
Zeavin and Gordon probe the ways in which teletherapy has threatened the expertise of therapists and empowered patients, experimented with artificial intelligence, raised issues of privacy and confidentiality, given the vulnerable more access and made them vulnerable, and changed the participants in and business model of therapy (“teletherapy has long been free and low fee and therefore served a sort of larger group of patients, including those who are marginalized and traditionally underserved”). They talk of Winnicott, Freudmania, the anxiety of mediation, Shakespeare, Harold Bloom, even Fran Lebowitz!
So what kind of progress have we made? Well, Zeavin had this to say this about how Microsoft Teams can record and instantly transcribe meetings: “It can really arrest creativity and spontaneity to have that much feedback. There's a reason why the analyst is enjoined not to interpret immediately but to allow for a kind of free association, and that to me sounds like the death of it.”
One of Zeavin’s central concepts is auto-intimacy, which is “a closed-circuit of self-communication, ruth through a relationship to a media object.” She says it “has been increasingly encouraged. It's part of gamification, right?” But can that kind of auto-intimacy lead to deep psychological healing? Not really. “All of the kinds of therapies that rely on this kind of auto-intimacy, don't care,” she says. “They're not interested at all, in something called the unconscious or interested in that kind of psychodynamic work.”
We think Zeavin's work will help both therapists and their patients move forward in this blended century. People are, she says, “in and out of their offices, and they're really looking for some guidance as to how to do that. It really changes almost everything about therapy.”
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
In 2022, you aren’t just what you eat. You’re also where and how and why and when and with whom you do so. It’s a whole new integrated experience, as we learned from Stage 2 of our Consumers Unmasked research project.
To enrich the study’s palate of insights, and help restaurateurs better understand their diners and employees, we convened three experts—Buck Sleeper, Head of Retail Experience Consulting in EPAM Continuum’s North American Digital Engagement Practice; Barbara Castiglia, Executive Editor of Modern Restaurant Management magazine and host of The Main Course podcast; and Nicole France, Product Marketing Evangelist at Contentful—to consider report’s findings.
The conversation provides a full menu of insights.
For starters, freshness matters to diners, in a holistic sense. “Freshness is not only in the ingredient itself but it's in the entire meal that you're having,” says Sleeper.
And ghost kitchens are here to stay—and are the drivers of new food ventures, according to Castiglia. “For a little bit of investment, you could have some new restauranteurs out there.”
“You don't even need a taco truck,” says France.
The group chewed over the idea of data—both the importance of big data for restaurants, and for small data as well. “Sometimes you really don't know what customers want unless you have a conversation,” says France.
France also talked about making data relevant and legible for employees: “It's all about interpreting that data into something meaningful, and honestly, that's a hell of a lot easier to share than big data sets.”
Sleeper notes that a quarter of Consumers Unmasked’s US respondents are watching food and video tutorials. Castiglia replies that, for restauranteurs, “Your digital footprint is very, very important now. So you have to examine which of these channels make the most sense for your brand and spend the time to put together an effort to engage with your guests.”
But the truth is, those guests might be difficult to reach. France says that many young people have are completely comfortable with delivery apps and online ordering but also have “this strange but very deeply held fear of actually interacting with people. So whether that's picking food up or eating in a restaurant, I think there's going to have to be something that adapts to that trend.”
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
In the brand-new book, SuperSight: What Augmented Reality Means for Our Lives, Our Work, and the Way We Imagine the Future, David Rose writes: “SuperSight is this decade’s convergence technology. It inherits the last thirty-plus years of enabling technologies like machine learning, computer vision, wearables, edge computing, 5G wireless, deep personalization, affective computing, and new interaction paradigms like gesture and voice—packaged in the familiar wear-all-day form of glasses.”
In the brand-new episode of The Resonance Test, Rose—a friend and former EPAM Continuum colleague—unpacks that statement with producer Ken Gordon, pulling out a long chain of colorful conversational insights.
SuperSight is an integrated technology, Rose says, that can “orchestrate and help simplify and tune and customize a lot of other systems, as long as there's open standards for how things talk to each other.” Operating at systems level can help us with in a variety of almost magical ways, such as personalized digital coaching, enhanced accurate medical diagnosis, and augmented learning.
But it’s not all good news—or a simple story. Rose walks through though the garden of dramatically named SuperSight Hazards—Social Insulation, State of Surveillance, Cognitive Crutches, Persuasive Persuasion, Training Bias, and SuperSight for Some—taking the time to explain the real dangers of this developing tech.
Rose shuttles us all around the SuperSight universe, talking about creating prototypes to help people with handwashing during the pandemic (one of which involved “using cuteness to seduce people into washing for 20 seconds”), the possibilities of glanceable commerce (will we go from eye tracking to the shopping cart?), the challenges of diminished reality, SuperSight city planning, even using AR to read his book.
So listen to this SuperSight-flavored conversation. It’ll augment your intelligence.
Host: Kenji Ross Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
What does it mean to be at the vanguard of leadership training? To find out, listen to Vanguard’s Michael Gunn. He’s the investment management company’s Global IT Audit Department Head—and the guy responsible for the firm’s unique leadership training program.
In the latest episode of The Resonance Test, Sandra Loughlin, Managing Principal and Head of Client Learning & Talent Enablement at EPAM, grills Gunn all about Vanguard’s A+ Leadership Program for IT. “It's something that I haven't seen before,” she says, noting its “comprehensive, 360, whole-organization approach.”
Gunn tells the pedagogic tale of how he gleaned, from listening closely to colleagues, that they prefer experiential learning and then set up a program that blocked of sections of time to provide such content and focused, small-group follow-up discussions (“Where leaders really like to dive deeper into the conversation and share more insights is in these six, seven, eight person IT leadership cadres,” says Gunn). This enabled leaders to connect with each other, reflect on what they’d learned, and ask: “How are you actually infusing learning into your day-to-day responsibility, both personally as well as with your team?”
The networked approach allows Vanguard’s leader-learners to focus on implementation, which is something that Loughlin and this podcast heartily endorse. It is a living, evolving process; as Gunn says: “It's not just one event. It's not just one conversation. It's this iteration on a topic.” Listen closely and Gunn will teach you that when it comes to learning, it’s smart to think like a product owner and work to understand product-market fit.
So if your organization could stand to improve its learning process, feel free to eavesdrop on the Gunn-Loughlin back-and-forth. You might just pick up an A+ insight or two.
Host: Toby Bottorf Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
It’s playtime on The Resonance Test.
Let’s welcome Ricardo Álvarez, MIT researcher and co-author, with Fábio Duarte, of Urban Play: Make-Believe, Technology, and Space, into the magic circle of our podcast. We’re going to talk about how playing with new technologies is what enables real transformations to happen.
Ken Gordon, our producer, goes hyper-ludic for this conversation and jumps with Álvarez on the big podcasting trampoline. They get into the interactive narrative of Disneyland (“This is storytelling in physical form,” says Álvarez), the co-designing of video games (“You effectively give players the tools not just to play the game, but ultimately to hack the game and express themselves through gameplay”), and the extremely flexible nature of the metaverse: “Because it's virtual it comes with the advantages of virtuality, which means not only can it be infinite, but it can be whatever you want. It doesn't need to subscribe to the laws of physics, the laws of nature.”
At one point, Gordon actually pretends to be an annoyed client, an inveterate optimizer, who doubts the value of all this playfulness.
“When you push for optimization, you're pushing towards specialization of these technologies, which means that your evolutionary path for that technology becomes constrained,” replies Álvarez, cool as a whole salad of cucumbers.
Álvarez brings up the idea that playfulness “is the attitude that helps us differentiate between ethical self-deception and sheer manipulation” and the challenges of going beyond prototypes in Fab Labs (“How do you move output for a Fab Lab to scale?”).
He also chews on the fact that we’re at an inflection point in VR history: “We're sitting at a moment in time when we are fundamentally designing the language of the new medium” and the responsibilities this creates for those at the table.
Well, what are you waiting for? Join the fun. Leap in. Hit Play.
Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
It’s easy enough to talk about ESG in the board room, at a town hall, even on a podcast. The tough part is making it real, comme on dit.
Which brings us to today’s guest, Xavier Houot, Senior Vice President of Sustainable Business and Operations at Schneider Electric—an organization that was recently named the world’s most sustainable corporation.
In a spirited dialogue with Elaina Shekhter, EPAM’s Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer, Houot explains Schneider Electric’s comprehensive and holistic approach to ESG.
“We start with looking at the challenges outside of ourselves,” says Houot, adding that Schneider Electric views itself “from an outside-in perspective.” They consider the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. They compare themselves with the best performers in each category of ESG—the best on safety, the best on circularity—and of course they consider their performance in relation to their performance of the previous six months.
“It's not very important to please ourselves saying we are better than we were [six months before]…. If we are better but it's not enough, that frankly doesn't make the world a better place.”
Houot and Shekhter’s conversation swerves in a variety of interesting directions: Straight into Schneider Electric’s Zero Carbon Project, over toward building the business case for sustainability, and high up into the issue of organizational leadership, with informative excursions into the challenges of measurement, the role of partnerships, and the meaning of COP26.
Most importantly, they take a realistic approach to ESG. Shekhter, for instance, insists on keeping it real when she asks: “How do you know that decarbonization is the right focus?” and Houot responds with full and informed candor. To hear the answer, and many other important points about ESG, click the link below.
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
To make the most of data, you need to understand that it requires more than an obvious linear process, with discrete handoffs and dashboards and such. It’s about properly viewing data in its living ecosystem, about seeing data as a *loop. *
The data loop, in fact, is the central focus of our most recent episode of The Resonance Test. John Reardon, VP & Senior Director of Global Risk Solutions Technology at Liberty Mutual Insurance, mixes it up with Val Tsitlik, EPAM’s Head of Big Data Practice and VP of Technology Solutions. Also looped in: Dmitry Grinberg, Managing Principal of Technology Solutions at EPAM, who lobs some great questions at these two data-driven men.
Reardon says that Liberty Mutual uses the data loop as a framework that “helps us shape our priorities and technical approaches, ensuring that we can realize incremental value and make it real along the way.” He then walks us through the key elements of the loop: unlocking data, making it accessible, providing “good, modern, self-service tooling whenever wherever possible,” and finally operationalizing all the insights the process produces.
One of the great advantages, Tsitlik notes, of the data loop is that it focuses the business conversation: Once an organization starts talking about data loops, they stop talking about data projects. It’s a mindset that looks at the situation “holistically… as a continuous process,” one that involves “ingesting more data” and “providing more access to various customer users.”
When they discuss how Liberty Mutual operationalized machine learning, Reardon says: “The more that we can build our models and our capabilities with a simple API approach, the more we can easily integrate those insights into different parts of our environment.”
Reardon emphasizes building simple models and deploying and iterating quickly. Everyone agrees that culture change is important and can be challenging.
He says: “You can easily understate or even miss, you know, the cultural aspect that's required to head down this path, and we spent a lot of time in our business group educating our leaders first.”
But right now it’s time for your education. Enjoy the conversation.
Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Let’s talk experience! In business today, we speak endlessly about digital experience, customer experience, employee experience, patient experience, provider experience, and so on. But one of the newest forms of experience to walk on the scene is still somewhat obscure: developer experience. With an increased focus on digital business, it’s really important for organizations to think about the professional and personal well-being of the people developing software for them.
The latest episode of Silo Busting double-clicks on this highly relevant topic. Listen up, and you’ll get the full download from Pavel Azaletskiy, EPAM’s Director of Technology Consulting and Head of Engineering Excellence Consulting in North America. He’s in conversation with Sandra Loughlin, Managing Principal and Head of Client Learning & Talent Enablement at EPAM.
Loughlin says: “Developer experience is about keeping developers happy and successful in their jobs” and that it involves various components: tools, culture, belief in job, and organizational vision.
Azaletskiy concurs and notes that developer experience isn’t just for companies exclusively focused on tech. “Every company right now is a technology company,” he adds. “Without efficient delivery and good developer experience it’s very hard to compete.”
This plugged-in conversation examines he cultural aspects of DevX, the interesting idea of citizen development, the essential elements that developers seek in a job, the relevant benchmarks companies should consider, and more. Experience it for yourself!
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
People don’t normally visit our Boston studio with a rack of superhero outfits. But this is exactly what happened on a recent Thursday afternoon: Sergei Nossoff, CEO of Teslasuit, and Andrei Pyko, who runs the company’s research team, dropped by to demo their sleek black haptic feedback garments. After permitting a few lucky people to suit up, get calibrated, and venture into VR land, they conducted a spirited conversation with Elaina Shekhter, EPAM’s Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer.
The trio talked about how the suit was originally conceived of as a video game accessory (Nossoff said that his CTO originally sought to “create a suit that would provide extra sensations during gaming”) but it’s currently used for (1) XR training and motion capture; and (2) medical and healthcare applications.
The task of the technology, said Pyko, is to get people deeply involved and forget that they’re zipped into a suit or a VR environment. “There are a lot of emotions just wearing the suit,” he said and added that donning the suit can prompt people to ask, “Am I a superhero?”
Zooming out, Shekhter noted that EPAM’s investment in Teslasuit, like our other recent investments, focuses on "identifying unique, technologically driven propositions that present an opportunity for EPAM to accelerate the company either through our own product development expertise or to act as a channel or as an integrator for a large number of our portfolio customers across multiple verticals.”
The portfolio of this conversation included such topics as Teslasuit’s current business model (B2G and B2B enterprise training services), their partnership with the Hospital for Special Surgery (Nossoff said the aim of the HSS partnership is to “create a product to allow patients to be treated remotely as well as be diagnosed remotely”), and how PII data and privacy factors in here (“So far, we do not have medical certification but we are working towards it,” said Pyko).
Where might Teslasuit be walking in the near future?
“In the longer term, we can really use this technology for the consumer market,” said Nossoff. He’s not necessarily thinking about video games, but fitness and wellbeing and yoga.
Shekhter joked about Teslasuit working with Louis Vuitton on yoga clothing, and Nossoff talked about pajamas for older people to take biometric parameters to prevent heart attacks during sleep and industrial PPE use.
All agreed that deep tech smart wearables have a future. And it might be a luxurious future at that.
“I wasn’t actually kidding about Louis Vuitton yoga wear,” said Shekhter. “We work with a lot of retailers who’d absolutely love to brand your black superhero suits.”
Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Data and dairy. You might not link these two words together—unless you’re Sidhant Jena, Co-Founder and Director of FaunaTech. In this conversation with our Duncan Freake, Jena explains his mission to bring “precision farming” to small farmers all over India (“probably the largest dairy producer in the world”) and, perhaps eventually, the globe. Jena is obsessed with solving the last-mile problems of dairy farmers, and he’s using the smartphone as a diagnostic tool to measure the quality of milk and health of the cows that deliver it. Freake says: “Last-mile measurement enables last-mile interventions,” and Jena compares what he’s doing to our recent experiences with COVID testing: “You need to do testing, and testing leads to tracing, and tracing leads to isolation.” Listen and learn about dairy data aggregation and sharing, the nuances of milk pricing, collaborating with government regulators, EHRs for farms, the quantified cow, and more. Intrigued? Pull up a stool and hit the play button.
Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
This episode of Silo Busting will school you on the topic of testing. In attendance are (1) Phillip Soffer, EPAM’s VP of Product-Service Systems; and (2) and Jonathan Lupo, our VP of Experience Design. Together they will ensure that the themes of testing, automation, and experience design are present and accounted for.
Testing is critical in this day and age. “AIs are biased in favor of the datasets they are trained on,” says Soffer. “Which may not be the same people for whom the systems are intended, or it may introduce really dangerous algorithmic bias that needs to be checked somehow.”
But the dangers are many in this world, and one of them involves time. In the old days, we had time for all kinds of individual tests: unit tests, integration tests, functional tests, user experience tests, accessibility tests. No more. “The time that there is for all these kinds of different tests is becoming increasingly compressed,” says Soffer.
Says Lupo: “Clients are not giving us more time; they’re giving us less to perform due diligence when we develop products and services.” One benefit of automated testing and analytic, he adds, is that “we don’t have to create these moments in a product lifecycle for testing, validation.” These, says Lupo, “can be happening continuously, in real time.”
Speaking of real time: Lupo asks Soffer if our current pandemic moment has an opportunity for automated remote testing?
Soffer says we used to have “hallway testing”—in which you could walk around use use officemates as testers. Once, this was a substitute for formal testing, but the pandemic shut it down. “What happens when you take away the hallway because everybody’s in a different place?” he asks and then answers: “We’ve had a lot more interest in doing that kind of hallway testing in a virtual way, through the testing crowd that we have as part of Test IO.”
So listen to what these experts have to say. What you’ll hear is not—not—a test.
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
The cyberthreats are out there. They’re real. And they’re not going away. This is why having a strong Managed Detection and Response program is absolutely necessary for the modern organization. MDRS matters. And in the latest #CybersecurityByDesign conversation, Shariq Hassan, EPAM’s Senior Manager Technology and Security Consulting, and Anton Romm, our Service Delivery Manager, explain to Producer Ken Gordon, why. It’s a complicated moment, and we need to take great care with everyone who wishes to connect with our organizations. As Hassan says: “Every user that logs into a network is a privileged user and should be considered a privileged user.” Listen to these experts to understand what Romm describes as “proactive threat-hunting activities.”
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
There’s no business like the idea business. That seems an apt motto for The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, a comprehensive new book by Louis Menand. Menand, who splits his time writing for The New Yorker and teaching at Harvard, is fascinated by the culture heroes who successfully brought their wares to market between 1945 and 1965. Also fascinated is producer Ken Gordon and in this episode, he interrogates Menand—who, by the way, snagged a Pulitzer for his 2001 book, The Metaphysical Club*—about his multi-dimensional new volume.
Menand admits that his ideal reader isn’t some corner-officed CEO, but we think that any executive who aspires to be a systems thinker should consult The Free World to appreciate the panoramic context surrounding our famed American innovations. Despite the deep cultural focus, The Free World is, from certain angles, a business book. “The ideology of creation is that we don’t talk about the business side of it,” says Menand. “But without the business side of it you can’t get your product out to people.”
The Free World, Menand says, details “the growth and maturity of the American culture industries. That would include Hollywood, the music business, book publishing, magazine publishing, and the art world. And also the university. All those industries boom after 1945.”
Our interlocutors discuss the social networks that helped the characters in The Free World succeed—the dramatis personae includes everyone from Jean-Paul Sartre to Susan Sontag to The Beatles to James Baldwin and their many colleagues and friends—and how these compare to today’s digital communities. “I’m an analog dinosaur,” Menand says, adding that, during his Zoom-enabled pandemic teaching, his students were busy kibbitzing in the chat: “They’re carrying on a separate conversation, most of which is in kind of digital language I don’t even understand.”
The talk here is smart and informative—the flat nature of the web’s cultural landscape (“There’s just an endless amount of stuff which all more or less has the same degree of temperature,” says Menand. “It’s like heat death in thermodynamics”), the surprises Menand found in writing (“Every time you open a door, there’s a whole story behind it”), the psychological importance of feeling free, and more—all of which will make you think about our present moment and how current social networks, market forces, and creative thinkers can and will align to take new ideas and make them real.
Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
What’s the cost of risk? It’s a big question for all sentient humans—but an extremely pertinent one for Padraic O'Reilly, Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder of CyberSaint Security. In fact, the dollar value of risk is a key element in how he does business with clients, as he explains to Boris Khazin, our Global Head of DRM Services, in our latest #CybersecurityByDesign conversation. It’s quite a moment for risk right now. Companies are deeply concerned about the plague of malware episodes and what they might cost them. “Because of the attacks we’ve seen this year,” he says, “we’re seeing that accelerate companies’ need to understand risk on the fly with fresh data.” The current “state of play” of GRC, says O’Reilly, involves “balkanized business functions talking to each other” and they might be doing a lot of this on spreadsheets (he calls it “spreadsheet madness”). They can do better, by going digital and using automation. It’s a very big deal. And O’Reilly underscores this by adding that even the big cloud providers say that they need partners who can “generate a view into risk.” This conversation will certainly generate great interest in the topic.
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Imagine you’re a CEO. You settle into your office in the morning and open your laptop… and there's no way to communicate with clients. “No phones. No emails. Nothing,” says Ofer Levinger, Senior Director of Business Unit Operations at EPAM, on the latest #CybersecurityByDesign episode of Silo Busting.
Levinger tells Adam Bishop, our Director of Information Security (and his podcast partner-in-crime): “It’s very hard for you in that particular moment to work [with] a cool mind, open the well-prepared incident response book, and play by it.”
Bishop notes that the idea of incident response has been around for decades but “things aren’t really improving.” Looking at the headlines about massive data breaches, “It almost feels like things are getting worse.”
Levinger, who has been the CEO of White Hat, the Israeli cybersecurity firm, since 2019, says most companies look at incident response as a “CISO problem, not an organizational problem. ‘It’s not a business problem.’”
This, they say, needs to change.
Listen as our conversationalists get into the intricacies of incident response: the communications challenges, the new ways hackers are getting in (“living off the land” attacks, for instance), zero trust, and more.
It’s a highly charged topic, one that creates a lot of stress for organizations. Bishop says that just having good cybersecurity hygiene is not enough to allow companies to sleep soundly nowadays.
Levinger says that it’s necessary to move beyond the reactive posture, which is an ongoing active process. And he adds: “If you have a CISO that sleeps good at night, you have a problem.”
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Innovation and agile: What do they have in common? How are they different? How can they work together? This episode of Silo Busting is about providing you a broad perspective on the way we work. We invited Eli Feldman, EPAM’s CTO of Advanced Technology, and Chris Michaud, EPAM Continuum’s VP and Head of Innovation Practice, to talk it out. Innovation for Michaud is “the act of bringing a new idea out into the market, out into the world” and that idea “creates value, creates impact.” Feldman says that this concept is “actually quite consistent with agile.” The pair spend much time thinking about the divergent/convergent methodology, which prompts Feldman to say that divergent is about “figuring out that we’re doing the right thing” while convergent hones in on “essentially getting that thing done.” They talk about both failing fast and learning fast. They even get specific and talk about our work on the Swiffer. It’s a lively dialogue that might invite you to bust a few silos of your own.
Host: Toby Bottorf Engineers: Matthew Fuhrmeister and Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
ESG. Many companies are talking about these three letters but none of them have spelled out exactly what it means to measure—properly and effectively—their Environmental, Social, and Governance activities. The herculean challenges of attempting to do so prompted Jennifer Howard-Grenville, the Diageo Professor of Organization Studies at the Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, to publish a smart piece in HBR entitled, “ESG Impact Is Hard to Measure—But It’s Not Impossible.” That article brought her to The Resonance Test to discuss with Elaina Shekhter, EPAM’s Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer and SVP, the nuances and challenges here. Howard-Grenville says that businesses are increasingly recognizing that “sustainability is absolutely core to their strategy; you cannot execute a strategy in the 21st century in any business without understanding, sustainability.” Figuring out how to manage this will require acknowledging the hubris in conventional measurement plans and taking a more systems-thinking approach. This is no mean feat, as Howard-Grenville suggests. “We live in a paradoxical world—we need short-term results, but we need to orient to the long term,” she says. “We're never going to break down that tension. We need to live with it. We need to move back and forth with it. We need to be okay with it and we need to understand it's difficult.” Press the play button and listen to some frank and thoughtful remarks about trying to take the true measure of ESG.
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
We learned many long-distance lessons during the pandemic. One of the most important involved visiting the doctor. As Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal, author of An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back and Editor-in-Chief of Kaiser Health News, tells our Jonathon Swersey in the latest episode of The Resonance Test: “Many of us spend way too much time schlepping into doctors’ offices for things that could be done perfectly well over the phone.”
The pandemic took telemedicine mainstream. Many who previously had only heard of it were forced to experience, practice, and pay for it. The question is: What’s it worth? “Is it 50% of a real, in-person visit? 70%? 100%? Sometimes [it’s] 120%! But I think it really depends on the kind of visit, and how it’s used, and who is creating the telemedicine system.”
Regarding the myriad unresolved details of telemedicine—what works well remotely, what must be done in person, how to value all these different treatment options—Rosenthal says: “We have a lot of sorting out to do.”
Rosenthal is, admittedly, somewhat skeptical about virtual care. “My worry always that it will be sold as useful because it’s commercial, before it’s useful—and that could give the whole field a bad name, frankly.” But whatever happens when the big telemedicine sort finally happens, it must ultimately be about creating balance. People will always need to do some things in a non-virtual way. As Rosenthal reminds us: “You can’t test someone’s reflexes on a screen.”
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
“If you do a penetration test to an organization and you get blocked, this is where you stop the test, right?” says Sharon Nimirovski who founded White-Hat Ltd., a leading Israeli cybersecurity firm recently acquired by EPAM. “But in real life, the attacker doesn’t do that.” In our latest #CybersecurityByDesign conversation Nimirovski tells Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, that nefarious actors keep looking for other ways inside. “They don’t leave. They’re moving to, maybe, spear phishing. They’re moving maybe to infected URLs, maybe infected Android apps.” How do Nimirovksi and his team meet this barrage of digital assaults? Behind the scenes they repel attackers by building “a database of all the attack techniques and the vectors they use.” His team brings this offensive armada to clients, to test for their systemic weaknesses, and when they find them they create a “vaccine” against the vulnerabilities (“That vaccine is only a behavioral rule that we embed into the client’s given technologies”). A fascinating conversion straight from the front lines of offensive security.
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
People are, belatedly, getting smarter about privacy—and there are all kinds of business and social ramifications here. This is what Jesse Redniss, Founder & CEO of Qonsent and Co-Founder of BRAVE Ventures, and Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, are talking about in the latest #CybersecurityByDesign episode of Silo Busting. Pointing to some very recent research, Redniss says: “Nearly 90% of people actually don’t want to have their data shared with external third parties off of their applications.” How can organizations and brands do better? “It comes down to value exchange,” says Redniss. We’re 100% certain that if you listen to this useful and informed conversation, you’ll learn much about Apple’s iOS 14.5, the new AppTrackingTransparency framework, the future of personally identifiable information (PII), and the challenges of privacy education. Just one click and you can jump on the platform of trust and transparency that is their dialogue. Welcome!
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer Ken Gordon
We’ve seen the future of risk management, and it’s going to be digital. Automaton and digital platforms are totally essential. Both Karl Viertel, CEO and Co-Founder of Alyne, and Boris Khazin, our Global Head of DRM Services, agree that Digital Risk Management is where we’re heading. In this episode of Silo Busting, these two experts delve into the idea of breaking silos, the importance of working with an organization’s second-line functions, the subtleties of risk quantification, and the generational shift in enterprises today. “There’s a new generation that see themselves as enablers of executing business processes in a safe and compliant way, as opposed to [being] hinderers of business,” says Viertel. Download the latest episode of Silo Busting—and do it quickly. As Viertel says, things are moving with extreme rapidity: “The change velocity in organizations is happening so much faster than a 36-month GRC implementation project can model that reality in the system.”
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Jeffrey Schnapp’s career is a study in professional interoperability. He’s Faculty Co-Director at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and the Founder and Faculty Director of metaLAB (at) Harvard. He’s the Carl A. Pescosolido Chair in Romance Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature and teaches at the famed Graduate School of Design. His business card identifies him as the Chief Visionary Office of Piaggio Fast Forward and, while we’re at it, he’s authored or edited 25 books. Whew. “It’s not good enough to be a generalist but if you are only a specialist, it’s unlikely that you’re going to see where the great areas of opportunity lie,” Schnapp tells producer Ken Gordon in the latest episode of The Resonance Test. At EPAM Continuum, we feel this idea. Profoundly. We also live in the world of multidisciplinary activity and saw a vast area of opportunity in creating a dialogue with Schnapp—about robots and the future of cities, loneliness, Dante, digital communities, the revitalization of public dialogues, libraries, and the psychopathologies of devices. Whew (again). Much to learn from a man has made his living as a “learner-in-chief.”
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
The bad guys don’t necessarily want your apps. What interests them? Your APIs. In our latest #CybersecurityByDesign conversation David Stewart, CEO of Approov, tells Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP: “The majority of attacks that we see are not done by modified apps but they’re done by scripts which have studied the app to the extent of being able to impersonate traffic and transactions that look like they’re coming from a genuine app instance.” This allows the nefarious actors out there to bypass apps completely. Scary stuff. Stewart and Rehman focus their talk on subtleties of API protection and attribute-based access control in the context of zero trust. Now, for you, keeping the mobile experience safe is important, but it’s Stewart’s raison d'être.“The reason we exist is to tell the back end that the API request is coming from a genuine app instance, and to do that on a very fast refresh so that it makes it impossible for the bad guys to get hold of anything they can use.” Download this conversation and you'll soon be thinking about shifting left while shielding right.
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
When we engage with an organization, they typically seek to help their customers “be more effective with their products and solutions,” says Keth Crotty, a Director of Business Development at EPAM. Crotty’s talking about something called “partner enablement”—and in this episode of Silo Busting Crotty, he and Jonathan Lupo, our VP of Experience Design, gently unbox the concept. In the course of Lupo’s genial cross-examination, Crotty says it’s all about asking, and answering, these questions: “What does that user need to know?” and “How do they get to it a very easy, intuitive way?” It’s very much about interoperability: “These systems need to be able to talk,” says Crotty. “They need to be able to share data with one another, so that this journey is not disconnected and interrupted.” Crotty also reminds us that a partner’s teams may well be siloed (a perfect topic for our podcast): “The team working on training information is not necessarily the same team working on product documentation and that’s not necessarily the same team working to support end users.” Click through and learn about the importance of having a unified content strategy, assembling the right professional services team, and more.
Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
As the world prepares to hang an open-for-business sign on our collective door, we’re at a threshold moment, one Albert Rees, VP and Head of Business Consulting at EPAM Continuum, has dubbed “Pre-Post-COVID.” In this episode of Silo Busting, he discusses the concept with Jason Peterson, EPAM’s Chief Financial Officer, and Larry Solomon, our SVP and Chief People Officer. The trio look at the current talent market, data’s role in pre-post-COVID, and what it all means in the complicated context of acquisitions. Peterson nicely sums up our transitional situation by noting that during the pandemic our leaders paired “modern data technologies” and Microsoft Teams meetings so they could “quickly interpret the data and then make decisions. And so we were way more nimble than we were previously and I think you’ll continue to see us [become even] more nimble in this post-COVID world.”
Host: Albert Rees Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Risk management has become a brave new digital world… though not every executive or organization recognizes this. Blake Brannon, CTO of One Trust, does. He recently spoke with Boris Khazin, our Global Head of DRM Services, and their conversation dug deep into risk-management’s unique new territory. “You move from this compliance-driven exercise that traditionally did GRC,” said Brannon, “to this operational, organization-wide initiative that you have to embed that risk-management program into.” In this #CybersecurityByDesign conversation, these two informed gentlemen address key topics in Digital Risk Management, or DRM, including: data governance, digital platforms, automated tooling, regulatory requirements, privacy, consumer expectations. Will you listen? Good. Ignorance is always a risky proposition.
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
The world is finally, cautiously, about to reopen. This is much-needed good news for the beleaguered retail industry. Question is: How can retailers design a shopping experience that will truly work for this brave new world? According to Buck Sleeper, leader of our Restaurants and Retail Vertical, the answer is Blend Space, a recent proof-of-concept project about “not just brick-and-mortar shopping but how we shop online, emerging trends in edge retail distribution, and what this space is going to look like in the future when we are fully recovered from this global pandemic and enter our new normal.” In this conversation with producer Ken Gordon, we learn how Blend Space is not omnichannel, where the outlines of Blend Space’s geography reside, what happens when cloud floats onto the scene, and how companies can start blending. Ultimately, says Sleeper, Blend Space gets to the point where “You can have your shopping experience and I can have mine, both within the same brand but on our own terms.”
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Layering biometrics on top of zero trust, says Bobby Varma, CEO and Co-Founder of Princeton Identity, is the way of the future. In the latest #CyberSecurityByDesign conversation, Varma and Boris Khazin, our Global Head of DRM Services, zoom in on this intriguing topic, one that’s extremely relevant in our current work-from-home world. Our Silo Busting conversationalists talk about how biometrics can create confidence for firms that the correct person—and only the correct person—is accessing sensitive data. But Varma also notes that biometrics is good for the user: “Authentication steps should not be cumbersome and should not impact user experience or diminish [user] productivity.” If you want to hear some informed thoughts on security in our increasingly hybrid work environments, all you have to do is hit the “play” button.
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
It’s tough to build trust in the digital age. Customers seek the kind of high-quality experiences one gets with, say, Amazon—and this means that many non-Amazonian industries need to rethink their operations. Brad Scrivner, President and CEO of Vast Bank and our guest on The Resonance Test, gets at this when he says, “Changing is a challenge” and admits that financial services “may be slower to adapt... than some other industries have been.” In this episode, Scrivner and Jim Kearney, Managing Principal in the Financial Services Consulting Practice at EPAM, deposit some worthwhile thoughts about how the pandemic changed Vast Bank’s approach to customer experience, conversational commerce, and how family banking has evolved. Scrivner talks about the influence Unlocking the Customer Value Chain had on him and explains how he get customers comfortable with the notion of digital assets. “Vast Bank owns the digital wallet, which would be the equivalent of the safety deposit box,” he says. When customers purchase cryptocurrency, it will “sit inside that digital wallet and the banking infrastructure and all of our partners are going to protect that asset for you.” Listen to Scrivner and you’ll learn a vast amount about what it means to lead a financial services organization today. Bank on it!
Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
“Having come out of months and months starved of human connection… our need and desire and demand for shared, in-person experience with others is going to really rise.”
This is one of the many true remarks Noreena Hertz makes, in speaking with producer Ken Gordon, on the latest episode of The Resonance Test.
Hertz, a British economist and bestselling author of The Lonely Century: How to Restore Human Connection in a World That's Pulling Apart, effortlessly spins out stories and data and insights about the job loneliness is doing on us.
In her book Hertz writes: “A lonely body is not a healthy one” and in conversation she adds: “When we’re lonely our blood pressure goes up. Our heart rate goes up. Our levels of cortisol, our stress levels in our body, go up. All of these essentially signaling to our body: ‘Stop being lonely. Go and find people to hunt and gather with. Go and find your tribe.’”
But loneliness isn’t merely bad for our health; it’s bad for business. “Lonely workers are less productive, less motivated, less efficient, more likely to quit a company than workers who are not,” says Hertz.
Hertz draws our attention to what she calls the loneliness economy and says it can be a win-win for us all: “If you can sell people authentic communities that speak to their needs to connect with others, you’re gonna have a significant customer base.”
Ultimately, Hertz hopes we will use our experience as lonely people to create a more relational form of capitalism. Let's hope she gets many readers. Humanity can use the help.
Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
“We all know as consumers that we want more, better, faster—for less money,” says Rick Champagne, AVP and Talent Advisor at Liberty Mutual Insurance. The question is: “How do we as an organization deliver those capabilities to our internal partners and then our external partners?” Well, this is one of several big questions Champagne takes up, with Sandra Loughlin, the Managing Principal of EPAM’s Learning Practice, in our latest edition of The Resonance Test. Together our dynamic duo hashes out the challenges in aligning skills with digital and tech strategy, creating a growth mindset in a big organization, and designing proper educational incentives. It’s an honest conversation about what it really takes to get people to learn. Says Loughlin: “We like to think, as adults, that we’re very different from little kids, but in some ways all of us like those gold stars.” We won’t promise a gold star if you listen… only that you’ll get smarter about educating your workforce.
Host: Kenji Ross Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
The world of mobile applications is insecure by default. That’s what you learn when you talk with Roel Caers, CEO of Guardsquare. In the latest edition of our #CybersecurityByDesign series, he tells Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, why he’s always taken a zero-trust approach to mobile. Caers says that developers must become “aware of everything that is possible and can be done to mobile applications.” He adds that 2-3% of sensitive apps “run on malicious devices, jailbroken or something else done to the device, and that’s a lot.” As Rehman reminds us: One jailbroken device is all you need to cause major mayhem, “because it can tap into the app store.” “The fact that these applications are not protected—it creates a huge attraction to hackers,” notes Caers. “It’s not only about data—it’s also about piracy or cloning or IP theft.” Our conversationalists also talk about reverse engineering, lookalike code, the integrity of apps, and static and dynamic protection, among other salient topics. Much to learn here for anyone who uses apps (which is to say: pretty much everyone). Listen up!
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Prepare yourself for an episode of Silo Busting with a tremendous amount of, as they say, yield. Alex Gounares, CEO of Polyverse Corporation, has returned pick up the zero-trust thread. This time around, he and Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, are following their way down the security supply chain. Asks Gounares: “If you don’t know where your binaries are coming from and you don’t know where the source code is and you don’t know who built it, what do you do then?” The guys chat about choosing between open source and proprietary code, building your own Linux as opposed to getting polymorphic, adding noise to the system, the patience of some attackers, and sophisticated back doors. It’s the insightful sound of #CybersecurityByDesign, friends, and it’s good. Trust us.
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Healthcare in the pandemic era requires thoughtful innovation. One physician who’s up to the challenge is cardiologist Dr. Asif Ali, Chief Medical Officer of Preventric and Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston. In this sprightly conversation with Lisa Butcher, Senior Director of Digital Engagement at EPAM, Ali tells many stories. One of which involves a patient he calls “Arthur,” a man who weighed 700 pounds and went into sudden cardiac arrest during his first visit to Ali’s office. “With his obesity, no doctor would touch him, no bariatric surgeon would touch him, because he had this sudden cardiac arrest,” Ali says. But thanks to chronic care- and remote patient management—plus a donated wearable and a diabetes-prevention program-provided nutritionist—Arthur lost over 450 pounds! But this is just one of the dramatic stories on this episode of The Resonance Test. Ali and Butcher dig deep into the collection of data and the treatment of vascular disease, medical consumerism, artificial intelligence and machine learning, the importance of partnerships, and what Ali calls “point-of-care decision making.” You’ll want to hit play on this conversation with a doctor who has a heart and understands exactly what makes it tick.
Host: Kenj Ross Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Data sharing in the age of COVID can be, according Anshu Sharma, Co-Founder and CEO of Skyflow, a matter of life and death. Sharma, the latest guest on our #CybersecurityByDesign series on Silo Busting, explains that Skyflow’s data privacy vaults are being used, right now, for COVID testing and vaccine information. This urgent topic reunites Sharma and Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, (both of whom worked at Oracle years ago) to unlock for us the mysteries of zero-trust privacy vaults. The pair talk about data privacy, look at contemporary encryption techniques, and consider how airlines, banks, Facebook, and the VA all deal with data. But the bass note of their conversation is COVID data: “all of this information needs to flow, but we have to be able to do this without compromising anybody’s privacy. This is not an unsolvable problem. The sad part is a lot of people think this is unsolvable but I think it’s totally solvable with today’s technology. If we solve this problem, we can save a lot of lives.” And that’s nor a mere assertion; it’s a fact.
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Apps don’t just bring us our favorite music and allow us to engage in mobile banking; they present great opportunities for cybercrime. More than 80% of cyberattacks enter through the application layer. That’s why this #CybersecurityByDesign episode of Silo Busting is focused on application security, or AppSec, as the experts call it. One of them, Eugene Dzihanau, EPAM’s Head of Defensive Security Services, joins Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, and Producer Ken Gordon to think out loud about what AppSec means right now. Dzihanau says that, in our cloud-driven present, “Applications became much more than applications” and that in this world “everything starts to become an application.” Rehman agrees and says that it’s a dangerous time because cybercriminals are looking vigorously for vulnerabilities. “Whenever there is change, there is chance for an exploit,” says Rehman. How to make applications more secure? Start at the start. Dzihanau says: “Thinking about security from an architecture perspective from the beginning will save you a lot of headaches.” Of course, it’s not simple to make this happen, and Dzihanau counsels us to approach this carefully and intentionally: “Don’t set the bar too high. Address the change in behavior of your developers and architects and make sure that the security steps are done throughout your SDLC, from the beginning to the end, from design to deployment.”
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
A bad experiment, says HBS professor Stefan Thomke, is one “where you learn nothing.” Thomke, the author of the recent volume Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments and our guest on The Resonance Test, should know. A thoughtful advocate of the methodical and effective testing of ideas, Thomke’s conversion with our Chris Michaud educated us on the many challenges of building an experimental culture and what leadership requires here. Experimentation is not easy. “Human nature gets in the way,” Thomke says. “We tend to happily accept good results, which are confirming our biases.” But when confronted by a “bad” result, he notes, “we challenge and thoroughly investigate it.” In Experimentation Works, we learn about the newly arrived Booking.com CEO who arrived and presented a logo to his staff. They responded: “That’s great; we’ll check it with an experiment.” Thomke also reminds us that building such a strong experimental culture can’t be done on the cheap. “CEOs get really excited about innovation and they tell everybody to be innovative but there are no budgets available,” says Thomke, adding: “You gotta put some serious resources into these kinds of things.” Invest in the next episode of the podcast and get smarter about your experiments.
Host: Kenj Ross Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
When Sun Tzu wrote: “All warfare is based on deception," he probably wasn’t thinking of the SolarWinds attack. But it seems like we might learn something about that recent event by studying his legendary text, The Art of War. Or so says Alex Gounares, CEO of Polyverse Corporation and our guest on the latest #CybersecurityByDesign episode of Silo Busting. Sun Tzu and the military talk about using decoys, says Gounares, and "cyber attackers use decoys all the time. And it works. It fooled World War II Germany with the decoys for the Calais invasion, it fooled in Confucian times, and it fools today in 2020.” If you don’t want to be fooled, you’ll attend—carefully—to what Gounares and Sam Rehman say in this spirited conversation. Gounares—who in a previous life was Bill Gates’ technological advisor—zeroes in on the extremely topical theme of zero-trust software. Says Gounares: “Zero trust is this idea of saying: Assume the world around you is messy.” Listening to these two veterans talk about micro-segmentation, entropy, and repeatability is an educational experience you won’t want to miss. Trust us.
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Robots are inching their way toward us. In the workplace. In hospitals. In grocery stores. This isn’t a necessarily alarming development. It's certainly not in the eyes of people like our guest, Marcio Macedo, Co-Founder and VP of Product at Ava Robotics. Macedo says it’s all about creating the right kind of human-to-robot partnerships: “To us, it comes to down to a focus on learning with the customer.”
Luckily, Macedo’s interlocutor this episode, Toby Bottorf, is the author of a classic blog post called “Robots for People: A Humanist Reframing of Automated Labor.” Their conversation is anything but robotic. For instance, Macedo talks about how, during family visits to nursing facilities during COVID times, Ava’s telepresence robot is “a very physical way for family members to come in,” adding that it’s “much more immersive and engaging than an iPad being brought on a tripod.” Bottorf points out the “stalking pandemic of loneliness, which Zoom is no cure for” and Macedo says: “There’s a lot of promise in robotics for sure in helping address that.”
Macedo talks about the hybrid office situation so many of us do, or will soon, face, and says that here robots will “not just deliver the productivity but some amount of accessibility and fairness as well, because there are populations that will not be able to be physically in the [workspace].” Can you see our robot avatars hanging out with each other? Bottorf can: “I have a mental image that makes me smile: The idea that in 2021 there will be workplaces where clusters of remote workers, or their robot physical presences, will be having a water cooler conversation.”
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas producer: Ken Gordon
Fast data is something else. The data from IoT, gaming, and media streaming needs to be collected and quickly analyzed by companies in order to make smart business decisions. Not every company understands how this works… though they all should learn. Fortunately, Mark Makary, CTO and Co-Founder of Logic Keepers—and our guest on Silo Busting—understands. The latest #CybersecurityByDesign episode of our podcast finds Makary and Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, burrowing deep and into this tricky subject. Makary says there are “a lot of business cases where you can use fast data to process events coming to you, including security” and that its predictive analytics are like a crystal ball. But Makary also warns: “This business advantage has also a window of opportunity,” and if you wait too long “you might actually lose the business benefits and that will diminish the return.” Note: This is a high-level and sometimes technical conversation. For those of you who are looking to learn more about how machine learning works here, for both the good guys and bad guys; the danger areas of fast data attacks; and the problems of model poisoning, the time has come to plug in your AirPods.
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
No doubt about it: COVID has educated us. The pandemic has taught the education ecosystem—students, parents, teachers, administrators, publishers—to review our educational tools and systems and say, “These could be better!” The big question is: How? To begin answering it, we spoke with two men who are deeply enmeshed in questions of EdTech. Our latest episode of Silo Busting features Kevin Labick, our SVP of Digital Engagement, and Dmitry Krasovskiy, our Head of Education & Learning, who are both present and ready with some A+ answers to producer Ken Gordon’s queries. Together they talk about how education's traditional a B2B2C business model is no more. “That broke when learning [went] virtual, en masse,” says Labick. For educational publishers and content creators, this means a focus on the leaners, and when end users become buyers, Krasovskiy says, “You need to change the way you approach product building and product implementation.” Take a seat in the virtual classroom of this episode and you’ll learn about the part design thinking plays here, the competencies educational publishers must take on, and even the future roles educators might play in our digital future.
Host: Alison Kotin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Loneliness: It’s hurting us. Dr. Sachin Jain, President and CEO of SCAN Group and Health Plan, has been talking about and treating the scourge of loneliness for years. Now he discusses this with Gaurav Rohatgi on the latest episode of The Resonance Test. Jain reveals the roots of his obsession: It started with an undergraduate course with Robert Putnam and his book Bowling Alone, which “showed us all the importance of social connection to social outcomes.” The dialogue ventures into the world of social media (“We’ve substituted a lot of community participation with online connection”) and COVID (a friend of Jain’s said about the pandemic: "I’ve spent more time with my son in the last six months than I had in the previous five years of his life”). Jain recalls his Togetherness Program at CareMore, in which “small nudges ultimately translated into fewer admissions and better health outcomes for the people who were part of the program” and covers his recent work at SCAN: “We employ a number of our senior citizen members to make regular outreach phone calls to fellow members.” It’s a fascinating and occasionally paradoxical conversion. Jain says that loneliness “is not a complicated problem to solve,” while at the same time maintaining that “This isn’t simple work—it’s simple on the surface but it’s quite meaningful and quite emotionally complicated when you actually dig into it.” We suspect you’ll dig it a lot.
Host: Kenji Ross Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Let’s talk about vulnerability, and not the Brené Brown sort. We mean software. Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, says in a new #CybersecurityByDesign episode of Silo Busting: “Software will have vulnerabilities… The only question is: Can they be used?” In an informative conversation with producer Ken Gordon, Rehman argues for reconfiguring software development lifecycle—or SDLC, as they say in the vernacular—“so that security is actually engrained into the process, not as a stop-and-go, stop-and-go method but it’s actually built in and is continuous.” Rehman believes in incessantly reassessing one’s organization’s threat profile, as inputs and outputs change over time. Why? The moment any organization, including yours, releases a piece of software—“That’s an entry point to the enterprise.” Rehman says that secure SDLC “is for everybody.” Question is: Is that a group to which you and your organization belong? You know the answer.
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kip Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Peter Senge—the renowned architect of systems thinking and author of the 1990 classic, The Fifth Discipline—doesn’t love the word “system.” “I always try to kind of demystify the word ‘system,’ because that's a bit of a problem we've always had,” he says on the most recent episode of The Resonance Test. “System is an off-putting word.” This is, in fact, one of many surprises nestled in his lively conversation with Rick Curtis, Senior Director of EPAM Continuum, and Paul McCormick, a Principal Consultant at EPAM. Senge’s holistic and humanistic worldview plays nicely off of Curtis-and-McCormick’s pleasantly British style of inquiry. He speaks in mini-lectures about systems thinking (of course), adaptivity, innovation, competition, collaboration, and data in a slightly hoarse but consistently positive voice. Senge is both informative—he teaches us that Latin root for the word “compete” means “striving or seeking together”—and a skilled, off-the-cuff aphorist. Press play and hear him say (among other things):
“Deep change never starts with a majority. Revolutions always start with small numbers. The real changes always start on the periphery of the mainstream.”
“Even direct competitors have to work together to create healthy market conditions, which in turn can allow them to compete.”
“What we often call human nature, I would call habit—collective habits of thinking and acting. And that's culture.”
“You can throw away the word ‘system’ entirely and just talk about [how] we live in webs of interdependence, where my wellbeing depends a lot on yours, and we're continually influencing each other.”
“The basic element is awakening people's intuitive understanding that we always live in an interdependent interconnected reality.”
“Competition and collaboration are natural sisters. They go together. And that's true in business just as well.”
Host: Kyle Wing Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Dustin Boutet, our Travel and Hospitality Vertical Lead, thinks about seniors and their driving habits. A lot. Joseph Coughlin, Director of the MIT AgeLab and author of The Longevity Economy, happens to share his obsession… and he’s been pondering it since before Boutet had a driver’s license.
Which is we had the pair take The Resonance Test out for a spin together.
Coughlin clears up some common misconceptions with his to-the-point pronouncements. On the topic of age and driver safety, he says, “Birthdays do not predict anything. In fact, birthdays do not kill; health conditions do,” adding sensibly: “I think that we really need to think about driving performance and wellbeing across the lifespan.”
He talks about how today’s cars designed for a “pilot,” and a specific one at that: “about 5’10”, 27-year-old male, both in terms of the structure of the vehicle as well as the toys and the technologies behind the dash.”
Together the pair circle around Silverkey, the EPAM Continuum concept project that aims to keep older drivers on the road safer and longer, the AgeLab’s work on BMW’s iDrive, and those tricky conversations (Coughlin calls them “exceedingly conflictual, emotional conversations”) families must sometimes have around senior driving.
Things get philosophical, fast. “Driving is far more than getting from point A to B,” Coughlin tells Boutet. “That would be a nice, easy urban planning problem to solve. In fact, it’s about independence and security.“
Hop in, and get an earful about what it means to age in the passenger seat.
Host: Kyle Wing Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
People, generally speaking, have the wrong idea about disability… or so says Sara Hendren, author of a sharp new book called What Can a Body Do? The Olin College professor insists on making us see disability in a more human light and learning from our improved sight. She writes, for instance, that “disability is not a fixed or permanent label that belongs only to some people; it arrives for each of us,” adding that while misfit situations—“a disharmony that runs both ways, body to world and back”—are inevitable, they should ideally be met with resilience and creativity. (Her book teems with story after story of such meetings.) In this Resonance Test conversation with producer Ken Gordon, Hendren expands on her book and explains, among other things, how misfit scenarios don’t have to be isolating but can, in fact, build community. She talks about aging—“In our own country old age is a really an under-imagined moment of life. We tend to make it super passive, and we tend to patronize older adults in a way that's pretty shameful”—and about the idea of incessant adaptation: “Adaptation is the fundamental state.” Above all, Hendren’s words enjoined us to pay attention—to our bodies, the bodies of others, and the environment in which they move about. The point of doing so: Striving to give everyone access to a more pleasurable life and even a richer language. “My hope is that by paying attention, we get better language, meaning, non-jargony, non-expert, non-technical language but just language that is ready to hand for the things in our lives.”
Host: Kyle Wing Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
The cloud is an opaque space. Few people know how to migrate safely upwards. Fortunately, in the first of our #CybersecurityByDesign episodes of Silo Busting, we talk with an expert who skillfully navigates the cloud: Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP. Rehman breaks through the nimbus surrounding the topic and explains to producer Ken Gordon the special nature of cloud security, the importance of data strategy, the smart way to fly through multiple clouds, the cloud’s agile dynamism and elasticity, and the cloud-based fear many people feel (and how to disarm it). Truth is, the cloud is complicated and organizations need to cultivate a more realistic understanding here. Says Rehman: “A lot of people move to the cloud not thinking about ‘What exactly is the boundary? What exactly is the protection?’” Pay attention, and you’ll be soon floating such essential questions yourself.
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kip Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Clayton Rose got the upper hand on COVID-19. Rose is the President of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and he has overseen the successful reopening of his school for the Fall 2020 semester. By reducing the on-campus student population; implementing strict testing, social distancing, and masking policies; and producing a stream of clear and continuous health reporting, the school’s COVID cases dropped from three to, as of the airing of this episode, zero. (Yes, zero.) Rose humbly says: “The congratulations really belong to our students and faculty and staff here” who complied.
Rose acknowledges that redesigning the fall student experience required being iterative, knowing that “there are going to be things that we're going to try that aren't going to work exactly right, or sometimes are not going to work at all. And you have to be open minded to adjusting or changing or just putting aside” whatever fails to make the grade.
In this back-to-school episode of The Resonance Test, producer Ken Gordon, who recently sent his own daughter to Bowdoin, throws a series of questions at the president. They talk about the importance of having first-year students on campus (and how non-first-years feel about this), reconfiguring collegiate space in the pandemic era, the intricacies of designing an effective COVID dashboard, and why his community needs to stay vigilant if they’re to keep the virus off campus.
Host: Kyle Wing Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Over the last 40 years, says Jit Agarwal, our VP of Enterprise Products, supply chains have “become very strung out, very long, very complicated, very convoluted, and very, very diverse.” This has made them brittle, a fact that the pandemic has brutally exposed. Denis Grishin, our VP and Supply Chain Practice Leader and Agarwal’s interlocutor for this episode, adds that for the longest time, “the name of the game was productivity”—but supply chains’ efficiency “did us a disservice.” Plug in your earbuds to hear their ideas about creating more resilient supply chains today (Grishin says, for instance, that you should “try to cut out the complexity that’s not really contributive or additive to your business”). The pair toss up some agile answers to the questions of the inquiring Ken Gordon, on topics such as demand partnerships, streamlining, future-proofing teams, and forecasting (“Forecasting is ultimately an inexact science. The forecast is always wrong,” says Grishin. “The reality always is something else”). Tune in, and you’ll learn not just about where supply chains are headed—you’ll also discover Agarwal’s secret nickname! Well, sort of.
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
We need to talk about electronic medical records. Dr. Danielle Ofri certainly does. Why? The physician-author of the newly published volume, When We Do Harm, tells our Jonathon Swersey, on the latest episode of this podcast: “I was just tearing my hair out” because a patient requested a biopsy report and she spent nearly 45 minutes trying to extract it from the EMR. When Ofri says “now it falls on the clinicians to somehow find time to customize the EMR to make it workable,” you get a vivid sense of how EMRs contribute to physician burnout.
Ofri, it turns out, has all kinds of strong opinions. Listen to this episode and you’ll learn, for instance, how shame functions in the world of medical error. (After making an error as a second-year resident, she says: “It took me 20 years till I could talk about and write about it.”) Ofri also discusses the naming of medicines, the common good and American healthcare, and what it’s like to practice medicine during the current pandemic and prepare for the next one.
Attend to Ofri, Resonance Test listeners. When she speaks, she does good.
Host: Kyle Wing Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
In our remote present, people—a group that includes you—have been left to their own devices. This means we must all develop a capacity for learning. Fast. Today’s guests have a deep understanding of why we should reskill ourselves in the next normal. Sandra Loughlin, our Head of Learning Practice, and Jit Agarwal, VP of Enterprise Products, give Silo Busting Producer, Ken Gordon, 762.5 earfuls of what it means for contemporary workers to experience and harness facilitative anxiety. The pair talk about many relevant topics, including the shift in mindset needed for this moment. Loughlin says the explosion of remote work has led to the rise of “a different mindset of management. Instead of thinking about seat time or being visible, their focus is shifting to outcomes.” In this environment, she says, employees must think about agility and resilience. Agarwal adds that they should think about their particular jobs, companies, and industries and figure out how can stay ahead of the curve by developing a “bleeding-edge skillset.” They also talk about mentoring in the age of “figure it out” or FIO and discuss common online training tools and the importance of feedback. This learning is as easy as listening, so unclog your ears and get smart.
Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Want to get schooled on innovation and higher education? Talk with Andy Boynton. Boynton is the John and Linda Powers Family Dean at the Boston College Carroll School of Management. He’s also a long-term friend of ours (we helped [BC redesign their core curriculum). As we’ve been lately thinking about the higher-ed experience, we decided to invite him onto The Resonance Test. In this informal-and-informed conversation, our Toby Bottorf, who knows a thing or two about college administrators, chatted with Boynton about the fundamental nature of design thinking, in and out of the classroom. Boynton talked about ideas and competitive advantage and the importance of the “connective tissue” of innovation. He spoke of time (“Spending time up front makes it faster in the long run. And by the way, it’s gonna bring success faster”) and cost (“Throwing a lot of products and services out and seeing which ones stick sounds very expensive to me”). As for BC’s own innovations, he says things have been “incredibly collaborative all summer across the university” and that they’ve prepared for this by, um, working with us. “You don’t flip a switch and say, ‘OK, let’s innovate together, let’s collaborate. You gotta have the right culture in place.”
Host: Kyle Wing Editor: Kip Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
We’re not talking about your grandfather’s cybersecurity. In our remote present, cybercriminals have many—too many—new opportunities to inflict damage on our vast out-of-the-office workforce. To obtain some much-needed perspective on security during our inherently insecure era, we brought in our Sam Rehman, Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, and Jit Agarwal, VP of Enterprise Products, to answer some questions from SILO BUSTING producer Ken Gordon. Their informed, pointed, and occasionally scary answers—on topics such as cybersecurity training and education, automation, and trust—have arrived just in time. As Rehman says: “The attack surface is just expanding.” With criminals phishing and impersonating their way into our digital lives, infecting our computers with malware and ransomware, we’ll need to rethink cybersecurity. Seriously. Trust us. Better yet, trust but verify.
Host: Alison Kotin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Who’s the person you really want to speak with during a pandemic? Why, a digital epidemiologist of course. And so we rang up John Brownstein, Chief Innovation Officer of Boston Children’s Hospital—and a former Resonance Test guest—so we might all benefit from his particular expertise. In this conversation, our Jonathon Swersey talks with Brownstein about population health monitoring, the collection of COVID-19 data, the relaxation of regulations during the pandemic, and why it’s a good idea to watch, closely, what happens on social media and in hospital parking lots. If you're part of the population whose life has been affected by COVID-19, you'll want to listen.
Host: Kyle Wing Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a test for innovators. The immense challenges of the situation have called for fast, scalable solutions—and two of the more prominent approaches have come to the fore: open source and crowdsource. In this episode of The Resonance Test, we interrogate some people who’ve played essential roles here. Dr. Freddy T. Nguyen, Co-Director of the MIT COVID-19 Challenge, Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT, and a Pathology Resident at Mount Sinai Hospital, has done tremendous work convening teams from across the globe to crowdsource pandemic-related innovation. His conversation partner is EPAM Continuum’s Duncan Freake, a mechanical engineer who is one of the brains behind GENTL Mask, our open source design that employs readily available materials and a simple manufacturing process to enable localized manufacturing. Our Ken Gordon peppers the duo with questions and gets some really interesting responses, giving us an important look at how partnerships, humility, and especially networks functioned in their pandemic projects. “The value of a network is really investing in good people who have the right spirit and the right motivations,” says Dr. Nguyen—and we think that these words are not just true: they also describe both himself and Duncan.
The good news is: We’re open for business! The less-than-good news: It’s not a smooth process. The staggered, partial, uncertain return to our old professional haunts has arrived. Sort of. For some of us. It’s complicated. To sort out what’s actually happening in our offices, we brought together Jitin Agarwal, VP of Enterprise Products for EPAM, and Ken Gordon, EPAM Continuum’s Principal Communications Specialist and Silo Busting’s Producer, and got ‘em kibitzing. Together they hash out what executives are worried about regarding the reopening, contact tracing at the office, the demise of the business handshake, the tricky matter of office access, open sourcing our way through the pandemic, and more!
Host: Macy Donaway Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Retail is—slowly, slowly—reopening. The industry has been walloped, but it’s striving mightily to rally. What will retail’s next normal look and feel like? What will it take to make the restart safe, human-centered, and economically viable? To find out, we turned to Buck Sleeper, Directo of EPAM Continuum’s Restaurant and Retail Innovation vertical, and Jitin Agarwal, VP of Enterprise Products for EPAM. Since Agawarl recently wrote about the rebirth of retail and Sleeper has long been interested in retail’s physical and digital merge, our Ken Gordon thought it was an appropriate time to toss some questions in their direction. Together the guys are optimistically cautious, or cautiously optimistic, about throwing an open sign on the industry’s big door. But they recognize that the industry is moving into new extremely new territory, and it must move with care. As Sleeper says about his most recent shopping experience: “I'll admit, I made it about 10 feet in the door, turned around, drove home, and completed my purchase online.”
In the two years since Catherine D’Ignazio last spoke with our Jen Ashman, she has co-authored a fascinating book called [Data Feminism and started a new gig as an Assistant Professor of Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. This time, their dialogue touches on the global benefits of teaching data feminism—“a way of thinking about data, both their uses and their limits, that is informed by direct experience, by a commitment to action, and by intersectional feminist thought," write D'Ignazio and her co-author Lauren F. Klein—remotely. Listen and learn about how our interdependence might lead to co-liberation, edible pie charts, and the idea of situated knowledge. There are multiple sides to this delightfully intelligent conversation, which makes sense because, as D'Ignazio says: “Data can be many things. Data could be images. They could be stories. They could be responses to a question.” Stand by for a number of thoughtful questions and wise responses…
Host: Macy Donaway Editor: Kip Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
For many organizations, our remote present is rough. In the third episode of Silo Busting, Chris Michaud, VP and Head of our Innovation Practice, says that for some clients “There's a fear. There's almost a frozen-ness to it of ‘How do we, say, continue to connect with our consumers? We're really not well structured to be direct-to-consumer. We're highly reliant on our physical stores or physical channels to be able to get distribution.’” To which Albert Rees, SVP and Head of Business Consulting and Michaud’s conversation partner, says: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Fact is, EPAM is fortunate in that we know a thing or two, or three, about being a distributed and remote workforce, and so we’re in a position to help. Michaud and Rees share stories and insights around what we’ve lately learned. Their dialogue zeroes in on working in a world in lockdown; the sudden and serious need for digital adoption; and how some orgs are finding creative ways to connect with customers in the era of social distancing. It’s all part of what Rees calls “business as usual in unusual times.”
Host: Macy Donaway Editor: Kip Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
The three most important letters in the alphabet right now are PPE. The personal protective equipment shortage is a major problem. The tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic will be multiplied, exponentially, if doctors and nurses can’t get the necessary masks, gloves, and gowns to shield themselves as they treat patients.
What’s needed is a fast and effective response—and this requires both innovation and cooperation. These two elements can be found in the GENTL Mask project, EPAM Continuum’s open source PPE effort.
In this episode of Silo Busting, we’re proud to tell the story of the GENTL Mask. Jit Agarwal, VP of Enterprise Products for EPAM, speaks with Rich Ciccarelli,, Senior Director of our Made Real Lab™, and Duncan Freake, Senior Mechanical Engineer, two leaders of the GENTL Mask initiative. It’s a tale of speed, skill, and scale. “Good Enough, Not Too Late [GENTL] has been the guiding principle of a lot of our decisions here,” says Freake, explaining both the project’s ethos and name. “We set out to design something that would really provide meaningful protection and not take months to develop or be based on equipment that would not be set up until June.” Listen and learn how the GENTL Mask was briskly prototyped in our Made Real Lab, the role partnerships play here, and the open source nature of the project. We hope it will inform and inspire you.
Host: Macy Donaway Editor: Kip Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
For some people—too many of ‘em—“automation” inspires little more than fear and loathing. That’s bad news for both companies and consumers. The good news: EPAM Continuum consultants understand intelligent automation deeply, and are skilled at explaining its manifold benefits. No one gets IA better than Albert Rees, SVP and Head of Business Consulting at EPAM Continuum. In this, the premier conversation of our brand-new podcast, Silo Busting, Rees and Chris Michaud, VP and Head of our Innovation Practice, kibitz about IA: its history, its role in business transformation, and its customer-centered outcomes. Consider Rees on banking and automation: “The problem statement all along was ‘I don't want to go in the branch. I don't want to be sold the mortgage every time I want to make a deposit. I don't want to deal with the lines. I don't want to deal with that stinking deposit slip, right?’ So all that stuff said: The experience has to change. I can assure you there's automation, from scanning that check through your phone, all the way through, ‘It's showing up now in your account,’ two seconds later.” So listen to the episode, share it with an automation-averse friend or client, and change that person’s understanding of IA. It’s the intelligent thing to do.
Host: Macy Donaway Editor: Kip Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Welcome to Adaptive Enterprise, a podcast series in which we match up EPAM subject matter experts with Forrester Research analysts to talk out the major Digital Product Development opportunities of the day.
In our first episode, Elaina Shekhter, CMO & Head of Strategy at EPAM, sits down with our guest Allen Bonde, VP & Research Director covering digital transformation at Forrester, to discuss the building blocks of adaptive enterprises and what it takes to create new ecosystems that open the door to innovation opportunities.
Stay tuned for more scintillating sessions with lead analysts from Forrester & EPAM experts.
Is there anyone who has done more to illustrate the pathos, drama, and humanity surrounding medical diagnosis than Dr. Lisa Sanders? If you jokingly said, “Dr. Gregory House!” you’ve unwittingly acknowledged Sanders’ deep influence (her work inspired the television show House). As a physician, Yale Medical School professor, author, New York Times magazine columnist, and host of her own Netflix documentary series, Diagnosis, Sanders wears many hats on multiple platforms. She was, in fact, in Boston to tape a TEDMED talk, when she walked over to our studio in the Seaport.
No matter what form her stories take, they always involve empathy for the patient and a Sherlock Holmesian curiosity from the diagnostician. And in this conversation with our Jonathon Swersey she gets into all kinds of interesting topics: the limitations of today’s genetic testing , how her storytelling has educated people about medical uncertainty, the role social media can play in diagnosing patients, and the complicated theatrics of the healthcare trade.
Sanders says that diagnosis requires a good set of ears, a working heart, and a sharp imagination. “The best way to get people to talk to you is to be actually interested in what they have to say,” says Sanders. “And be able to demonstrate that by being quiet and listening to what they have to say.” Fortunately for us, Sanders was nowhere close to quiet in the conversation that follows. You’ll want to listen to it. STAT.
Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kip Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
When the New York Times’ Travel editor, Amy Virshup, announced that her section was going to “offset airplane travel by staff members on assignment,” we were intrigued. “It is, I know, a small gesture. But it’s a start,” she wrote—and we admired the way she was prototyping a real innovation in travel journalism. We were so impressed that we connected with her to see what else she had to say about the current state of travel. At the end of February, our Dustin Boutet, who leads our Travel and Hospitality Vertical, spoke with Virshup and asked not just about climate change but about experiential travel, the industry’s platform wars, editing in the age of social media, the paper’s famed “52 Places to Go” series, and the tricky issue of reclining on an airplane. We think you’ll agree that the conversation traversed some interesting ground.
Rita McGrath, a distinguished professor at Columbia Business school and well-respected author, prides herself in being able to see around corners (her most recent book : Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen.) Similarly, we’ve long backcasted our way through the innovation space. So when we got together, for a Resonance Test chat, numerous future-facing remarks were dropped into the mix. “A lot of times the people that see an inflection point really early are not in the Strategy Group,” said McGrath, adding: “They could be out at the periphery. They could be on a loading dock somewhere.” In this conversation McGrath thinks it out with the perspicacious Toby Bottorf, Senior Director and Head of Client Engagement at EPAM Continuum. Listen closely—what you hear today might just prepare you for tomorrow.
Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kip Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Love is in the air. Pastry love, that is. Pastry Love is the latest volume by Joanne Chang—James Beard Award-winning pastry chef, restaurateur, author—but it’s also the motivating philosophy behind the success of her string of Flour Bakery + Cafés. “The idea of pastry love is really to try to entice people when they come into the bakery to order one of everything because we know that if you eat our pastries, you'll be happy.” In the latest episode of The Resonance Test, Buck Sleeper, who leads our Restaurants and Retail Vertical, talks with Chang about pastry love: how it motivates both employees and customers, how it fits between two covers, and how she brought it, reluctantly, into the digital age. This a conversation about the evolution of a business and Chang’s iterative, intelligent spirit. It’s also a very personal edition of the podcast. As our Boston studio is just a few floors above the Seaport’s Flour Bakery + Cafe, many of us are regular beneficiaries of said pastry love. Dig in!
“Organizations are fascinating because they're completely human created,” says Harvard Business School professor Gary Pisano in the just-posted episode of The Resonance Test. “They're not natural.” Which is to say: they are cultural. Pisano’s new book, Creative Construction: The DNA of Sustained Innovation, makes it clear that innovation is a set of choices a company, a leader, may or may not make. In an invigorating conversation with our Jon Campbell, Pisano asserts that “everything about organizational life was designed in some way” and therefore it can all be redesigned. Listen closely, and you’ll learn some relevant business lessons, including the paradoxes of innovative cultures and the challenges of earning today’s dollar while also charting a company’s future course.
Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
The world has many problems, but few solutions—too few good, effective, scalable solutions. MIT Solve seeks to change this. Solve, “a community of cross-sector leaders devoted to identifying and supporting solutions to actionable challenges through open innovation,” is helmed by Executive Director Alex Amouyel, who recently popped over to our Boston studio for a chat with Gaurav Rohatgi, Co-Lead of EPAM Continuum’s Life Sciences Vertical.
Amouyel explains that Solve is a “marketplace for social impact innovation,” to which Rohatgi asks: Why is such a marketplace necessary? In this free-flowing conversation, Amouyel talks about many topics: How her biochemistry background helps her communicate with her STEM-based network, a Solver team's cool childhood development milestones app, and the profound importance of optimism in social innovation. She also provides important details about the Challenge Design Workshop we’re co-hosting with Solve, in our Boston studio, on Tuesday, January 28, at 3 p.m. We hope you enjoy this dialogue and invite you to join us for the workshop—and perhaps a chance to have your own conversation with Amouyel.
Pull up a seat, sit down, and prepare to devour the first course of Why Now, a production of EPAM Continuum’s Resonance Test podcast. Why Now, which is hosted by our Megan Welker, explores the relationship between cultural trends and disruptive innovations.
Our first topic: the rise of alternative proteins. You can’t go out for a meal today without bumping into Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods somewhere on the menu. Why are meat-based meats seeing all this competition? To dig into the context, we asked Ayr Muir, Founder and CEO of Clover Food Lab, the Boston-based vegetarian food chain that’s been hawking Impossible meatball sandwiches since 2017: Why Now? Muir was refreshingly open in his responses. “We're in the food industry, and I think it's the most dishonest industry,” he said, adding that “It's a space where there's a lot of opportunity for creating real relationships. I think you have to start with trust to do that.” In the process, we learned what goes into Impossible meatballs and what they do for his business, the value of publicizing one’s mistakes, and the ways in which our food choices today are really about “voting for a certain future.” Curious to learn more? Listen to Why Now—now.
Host: Megan Welker Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon Restaurants & Retail Vertical Lead: Buck Sleeper
What happens when a renowned futurist joins EPAM Continuum? Here’s what happens: things get interesting. You feel this immediately by listening to a just-recorded conversation between our new colleague, David Rose—author of Enchanted Objects, former MIT Media Lab savant and Warby Parkerite—and our less-new but equally articulate colleague, Toby Bottorf. What’s special about Rose? It’s not just his informed outlook on augmented reality (“The new term is ‘spatial computing,’”) or his colorful experiences in tech and business. Yes, Rose casually deploys a variety of interesting words in conversation—“the topology of your face,” “pupillary distance,” “e-com funnel,” “a Louis XV gold sapphire brooch,” “vomiting rainbows on the plane of your face” and “pre-attentive processing”—but that’s not it either. It is the multiple possibilities Rose’s optimistic imagination brings to our work. “I tend to think that there are more journalists, whistle-blowers, and people who are willing to be alarmist in the world, rather than people who are trying to create the desirable future states,” he says. “And so I’d like to focus on the positive valence stuff.” We’re with him! Listen up, and you just might be, too.
Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Dr. Bryan Vartabedian is a pediatric gastroenterologist, or a “[g]astroenterologist to small people,” as he describes his specialization on his popular Twitter profile. Pediatrics is a complicated job, he explains, in the latest episode of The Resonance Test. In an intense conversation with our Jonathon Swersey, Dr. Vartabedian says: “We really serve two masters: we are morally and ethically obligated to that child who’s under our care, while at the same time we have an obligation to the surrogate or the parent who’s bringing that child in.” Listen in and you’ll hear him talk about the extreme metricization of patient experience: “As we strive to get those [patient satisfaction] numbers to link with Medicare reimbursement, there’s kind of this pressure to kind of operationalize human encounters, which is a little bit icky” and how “being a pain at times is part of the job of the parent looking after” a sick child. This honest and informed conversation will leave you with a strong sense of where healthcare is heading. “As medicine becomes more precise and more predictive and preemptive, the amount of data that’s emanating from us, via these genomic studies or imaging or what have you, is going to become greater and greater,” says Dr. Vartabedian. “And I think our role as physicians is going to be to act as a mediator or moderator of all these incoming inputs.”
Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
In May 2015, Alan Rusbridger stepped down as the editor of The Guardian. He had managed, over the course of 20 years, to transform the British paper into a digital phenomenon—a truly global source of news. His book, Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now, details that transformation. In a recent Resonance Test conversation, Rusbridger relates how it feels to not to report on Brexit Era U.K. politics (“I’m really rather relieved not to have anything to do with it”) and talks about the stress involved in digitizing one’s business:
“Suddenly you say to your staff: ‘By the way, we want you to update things every five minutes, every ten minutes. We want you to do it in video and audio as well as text. We want you to be on social media. We might want you to do live events as well. And by the way, you can’t go home at 9:00 because the story keeps updating till midnight...”
Listen closely, and you’ll learn about the uncertainly of life during a digital revolution, the dangers of deepfakes, the challenges of writing a business memoir, and even the extent of Rusbridger’s non-Chopin piano repertoire: “Given enough drink, I will sit and play show tunes all evening—but that doesn’t happen very often.”
Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts is about to turn 150. But hitting that big round anniversary doesn’t mean it’s a fossilized cultural organization. Just the opposite. The MFA attitude is young, vital, experimental. We learned this when we partnered with this storied institution to redesign their membership program. In this episode of The Resonance Test, Brandon Tirrell, our Associate Director of Innovation Consulting, talks about the project with Katie Getchell, Chief Brand Officer and Deputy Director at the MFA, and Julia Propp, Director of Membership. What happened when we showed up slinging human-centered design? Getchell says she and Propp were surprised in that “everybody around the table kind of lit up at the idea. It wasn’t as hard as maybe we might have feared.” Listen to Getchell and Propp talk about how the MFA did some bold, improvisational prototyping all on their own! This story proves than a venerable-yet-open-minded org can learn new kinds of flexibility. Or as Propp puts it: “Being comfortable with ambiguity was a muscle that we had to learn how to flex.”
Hosts: Brandon Tirrell and Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
How about that John Brownstein, PhD, eh? The Chief Innovation Officer at Boston Children’s Hospital, digital epidemiologist, Canadian, fan of hot peppers and the cinema of Wes Anderson, Brownstein recently skated over to EPAM Continuum’s Boston studio for a chat. The conversation ranged all over the ice, from voice computing (“We think that voice, especially for patients, whether in the home or the hospital… it’s very empowering”), to digital phenotypes, to population health (“There’s a whole field of disease forecasting that’s taking its lessons from weather forecasting”). Tune in for an informative, and fun, face-off.
Nick Dougherty is back! The Managing Director of MassChallenge HealthTech has returned to The Resonance Test to report on how his startups and champions have been working together. Since we last spoke with Dougherty, his program changed names—it was originally called Pulse@MassChallenge—and has created some great outcomes in digital health. MassChallenge HealthTech has shepherded approximately 90 companies through the program, and in the process created more than 270 partnerships. The impact is real: improvements to millions of patient lives, increases in revenue and funding for startups, increases in jobs. Always glad when an innovative program gets a clean bill of health. Listen and learn about what makes a good partnership, Gen Z entrepreneurship, and the role of data at MassChallenge HealthTech.
Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Dr. Eric Topol isn’t playing around. The author of Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again wants physicians to become activists—and to use technology to transform medicine. “That’s where we need to see the breakout. Doctors leading this charge, getting organized, and saying: ‘We’re not going to take it anymore and we’re demanding time with our patients!’” Artificial intelligence and machine learning, he says, can help us turn things around. However, adds Dr. Topol, this is far from a consensus opinion. “I think the idea that technology could enhance humanity in medicine is alien in this country.” In a spirited discussion with our own Jonathon Swersey, the good doctor touches on “the gift of time,” the role of patients and caregivers in the AI revolution, and how data should figure in healthcare’s future (“Right now, we have only fragments of people’s data about their health. Whereas we should have every part of their data from when they were in the womb up to the present moment”). We even learn, from this dialogue, which book we should read after finishing Deep Medicine. Tune in and download the latest chapter in the story of digital health.
“Human beings are notorious for wanting multiple conflicting things,” says Megan Burns, setting the tone of this episode of The Resonance Test: thoughtful, empathic, honest. One of the founding mothers of experience management, Burns honed her thinking at Forrester Research, producing more than 75 reports. Today Burns is the CEO of Experience Enterprises, but she hasn’t strayed a millimeter from the nuances of CX. “Is making it easy for someone who is trying to curb their spending habits to buy $400 worth of shoes at 3:00 in the morning from their bed from their phone… is that really meeting the customer’s ‘needs’? Probably not.” We’re thrilled to have Megan Burns Experience on the podcast. In this winning chinwag with our Toby Bottorf (no CX slouch himself,) these two parse the “E”s with warmth and intelligence. Of course, one listen won’t probably be enough—“Our conscious brains only notice about 40 pieces of the 11 million pieces of information we take in at any moment,” says Burns—but give it a shot. You can always re-experience it by hitting the play button.
Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Matt Sheehan is a passionate guy. As the President and CEO of Primo Water—North America’s leading single source provider of water dispensers, multi-gallon purified bottled water, and self-service refill water—he brings an undeniable sense of mission to his company culture, the retailers he works with, and thirsty customers. “I don’t care about being right, I care about getting it right,” he says, adding: “It doesn’t matter where the ideas come from.” That passion electrified his recent Resonance Test conversation with Kenji Ross, Senior Design Strategist at EPAM Continuum. Sheehan has strong opinions on many topics, among them: corporate values, Primo’s culture, (“If you have a big ego, Primo’s not a great place for you because we aren’t shy to tear apart some ideas,”) being a public company, and the hiring process (“We’re pretty picky about the people who get to carry our flag,”). Sheehan gets particularly jazzed about getting out and talking with customers—“Let’s really go to talk to Nancy Jones at the Walmart on 2 Main Street”—to find out what really motivates them. The insight from this customer experience work, he says, “has been a thousand light bulbs for us."
Sunandini Chopra spends her days working for IBM Watson Health (genomics and oncology). Her free time, however, belongs to AI for the Rest of Us, “a platform that facilitates discussion, problem identification and problem solving to create a positive impact on public health by leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence.” Platform? It’s a community. A discussion group. A gaggle of brainy AI brainstormers. We know because we hosted one of their events, at which Toby Bottorf, VP of Service & Experience Design, gave a sterling talk on AI and human augmentation in healthcare. Chopra visited The Resonance Test to report to Bottorf on chatbots, the power of Alexa (“Linked with your phone, with your television, with the speaker in your house, it can take you through the whole route of a digital visual experience, a texting experience, and an audio experience,”) the predictive similarities between meteorology and healthcare, the direction healthcare is heading (“There’re two futures: one that’s the future for cutting-edge technology and one the future for all the other people in the world to get access to basic care,”) and the adorable nature of RD-D2. Beep Boop.
You can call Gary David all kinds of things. Sociology professor. Ethnographer. Professional noticer. Professional outsider. A Storage Wars guy. He is, in short, someone with a very particular view of social science and how it translates into organizational behavior. In a recent Resonance Test chin wag with our Toby Bottorf, David offers up a collection of smart, tart bon mots. In the course of the conversation he explains the formula “Data + Context = Information” by calling in the cops: “You can’t understand what crime stats mean, unless you understand police practice.” He talks about how his CX analysis focuses on the interactions customers have with a company, rather than on perceptions. “By looking at the interactions, we can see what is actually going on in the encounter.” As for Storage Wars, he’s fascinated by the way the show puts a price tag on contestants' pickings: “[R]ight now you just got a bunch of stuff in your trunk, that you bought. So you’re actually down money,” he says, adding, professorially, that the show “constructs the notion that these numbers are an accurate reflection of some concrete state—and they’re not. They’re approximations.” But maybe the best moment of all is when David gets earnest and describes his efforts this way: “You’re trying to help workers actually leverage their expertise and their knowhow and become more self-actualized, in almost a Maslow sense, in their work.”
Host: Jen Ashman Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Legendary business author Tom Peters has long insisted on putting people first. Be excellent with customers and employees, and you’ll be reap the rewards. In an insightful and rollicking conversation with Jon Campbell, EPAM Continuum’s Head of Experience & Service Design, Peters sounds off on a variety of (always human-centered) topics. “I am an arch enemy of agile, if you capitalize the A, because then it becomes a religion,” he says. Turn in and hear him get a little choked up about Eisenhower’s leadership and heated about the idea of Management By Wandering Around, or MBWA: “If it’s not a kick to be out with your team in the distribution center at 1 a.m…. You. Are. In. The Wrong. Job.” There's plenty to ponder here as well. Numerous times, Peters calls up an extremely apt and memorable line, such as: “The best way to persuade someone is with your ears” (from former Secretary of State Dean Rusk), and you’ll think about it for days and days. A most resonant episode of The Resonance Test…
Host: Jen Ashman Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
If you want to study service design, you just might want to learn from Maurício Manhães. Manhães is both a professor of service design at the Savannah College of Art and Design—SCAD to its friends—and a truly affable human being. His friendly, informed approach leaps out from the first second of this dialogue with his long-time service design buddy, EPAM Continuum’s Jon Campbell. These two vets cover much territory in 30 minutes: Maurício’s professional and intellectual journey; the employability of SCAD grads; the function of luck and hard work in design careers; the Service Design Network and its president Birgit Mager (“she way very kind to pay attention to this crazy Brazilian guy”); bringing service design into companies; the way practice and professorship inform each other; the effects of Amazing Grace Syndrome, and, of course, more. Listen and learn!
Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
And now for a Very Special Episode of The Resonance Test. This particular conversation, straight from our archives, has our Toby Bottorf chatting up Thomas Thwaites, author of two thoughtfully bizarre books: GoatMan: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human (you read right!) and The Toaster Project: Or A Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch (sounds awesome, no?). It’s jolly great fun to hear Thwaites say things like: “I was really keen on learning to gallop and, you know, kind of chewing grass,” and: “If technology is about kind-of-letting-us fulfill-our-dreams-kind-of-thing, then I suppose it’s like: 'Which dreams do we try and fulfill?'” We think this is a great way to wind up the Resonance Test year. Thanks so much for listening—and please enjoy the goatish, toasty conversation between Thomas and Toby!
Host: Jen Ashman Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Heather Figallo, the Head of Design, Innovation & Entrepreneurship at Southwest Airlines, wants to “raise the expectations of the type of experience you should have when you’re traveling in commercial aviation.” So do we. The digital wayfinding project EPAM Continuum did with Figallo and her crew was very successful and we learned a lot from it. “I’ve never had something with 96% customer satisfaction, 94% employee satisfaction,” Figallo says, adding: “I’ve never seen something like that.” In the latest episode of The Resonance Test, Figallo and Lee Moreau, our VP of Design, take a payload of project insights and launch them into the world. The conversation has stops in a number of fascinating places: human-centered data, innovating in the highly regulated airline industry, responsible prototyping, and Southwest’s sui generis culture. Moreau and Figallo make it clear both Southwest and EPAM Continuum put their whole hearts into the digital wayfinding project, and the result was a very human outcome: “The real magic was turning data into knowledge and turning data into something personal.”
Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Jon Stolk is in the midst of an experiment. But then, so is everyone at Olin College(http://www.olin.edu/), in Needham, Massachusetts. This project-based engineering school is trying to find a way to do higher education differently. They are, in many respects, succeeding, as we learned when EPAM Continuum’s Toby Bottorf, VP of Service and Experience Design, recorded an electric conversation with Stolk, who serves as Olin’s professor of materials science and engineering education. Listen and learn what it’s like to provide “just enough scaffold for teams of students or for individuals to dig into questions or problems that are exciting and interesting to them.” Stolk admits he and the school have quite a task in front of them: “It’s scary as hell sometimes.” What causes such fear? Could well be, as Stolk says, that a school that was “created to transform education” can’t “get stuck with one curriculum.”
Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Data, data, everywhere. We grow more and more digitized every moment, and as humanity makes its digital transformation, we need people to help us understand what it means and how we can retain our own sense of values. We speak with two such people this time on The Resonance Test. Lily Tsai and Sarah Williams are professors at MIT. Tsai is a political scientist and the founder and faculty director of the MIT Governance Lab or GOV/LAB; Williams is the Director of the Civic Data Design Lab at MIT's School of Architecture and Planning. Together they spoke with our Lee Moreau about data, analytics, human-centered design, and civics. Listen, and you’ll hear our professors profess the following:
Tsai: “On social media or other new media digital platforms, we don’t where the information necessarily comes from, but we think we know. And that’s the problem. We think of them as the same as the newspaper, but they are not.”
Tsai: “Those who study the United States haven’t fully realized that the dynamics in the United States are very similar to the dynamics elsewhere.”
Williams: “In all the data analytic models I do, I really try to make them human-centered…. I’ll develop a model and then I ask those who the model describes whether they think it describes them accurately or, and then ask them to co-develop or change the model with me.”
Williams: “Missing data tells you a lot more than you might think.”
Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
There is so much fear in healthcare. Fear for patients, for the surgeons who treat them, for the families who have to stand by and watch anxiously as a loved one goes under the knife. But for Melissa Burke and her colleagues, fear is to be cut down to size by simulation. Rehearsal. Practice. As the Director of Operations of SIMPeds, Boston Children’s Simulator Program, Burke is obsessed with how simulation can help the players in our #healthcare drama to master their fear. In this excellent conversation with our Lee Moreau, she delves into the tactics, the meaning, and power of #medicalsimulation—and the hope it holds for the future.
• “The hospital’s a really emotional place and being able to quantify emotion in the healthcare setting enables a whole host of new opportunity.”
• “The single thread that joins everything we do at the simulator program is fear.”
• “The whole point of the simulator program is to enable rehearsal, opportunities to reduce fear and anxiety, to create confidence, and to create clinical teams that operate from a very mature state of confidence, and to increase the confidence of parents going home with children who maybe have new lifesaving medical equipment that they need to take with them. Or even to empower the children that we care for in making decisions about their own care or contributing to their care.”
• “We’re creating synthetic patients that look real and feel real, for our clinical teams to learn from. We’re creating psychologically safe environments for clinical teams to be able to make mistakes, admit mistakes, talk about their mistakes. We have human factors experts that use these medical simulations as the reason to have conversations around how to improve a team.”
• “I like to think of us as the nexus of medicine and theatre because we’re creating very lifelike environments, replicas of exact operating rooms or exact ICUs where these teams natively work. And we bring them in and we have them work on synthetic patients that look real and feel real, so their head is in the game.”
• “We also have patients’ families represented, so the mom who spent three months in an ICU can say: ‘Hey, if the headwall isn’t over by the window, my child wouldn’t see the light of day for three months.’”
• “When simulation is done wrong, people feel beaten down. They feel demoralized. But when simulation is done right, the entire team feels like they’re that much better.”
• “In our simulation center, we go to Disneyesque length to make things real. So our simulated patients bleed and urinate and speak. And sometimes we use actors, and the level of realism that is elicited when you have an actor playing a patient or an actor playing a parent is so real, I have to look away.”
Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Robing Glasco is a superhero. She goes where the love is. She is fearless, this Chief Innovation Office of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. Glasco is out to redesign healthcare, and she recognizes that this monumental task involves risk, collaboration, experimentation, and trust. She and Continuum’s Lee Moreau talk it all out in the latest iteration of our Resonance Test podcast. Here are some of her super remarks:
• “I really want to reinvent healthcare, and [to do that] you gotta be risky, you gotta have some fearlessness to you. If you’re into sports it’s kinda that Cam Newton pulling back that Superman pose that he does. I’m all down for that, so that’s how I leverage that in my world.”
• “My job is to break healthcare.... And by that I mean the status quo is not acceptable in healthcare.”
• “I’m not trying to perfect the pager,” she says, adding: “A good part of my role is the help the organization see that ‘the pager’ is not a viable, sustainable business model for us.”
• “Anyone in healthcare needs to spend time with physicians, working in that environment.”
• “Truly when human-centered design just becomes part of your DNA is when we don’t have to be there along the way, holding their hand.”
• “Health is a 360, 24-7 experience journey.”
• “There aren’t any winners in healthcare right now. There is pain across every step, every spot in the journey of healthcare.”
• “This is not the Robin Glasco Innovation Center. This should be a community asset that people should embrace and be able to see themselves as a part of.”
Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Snacks are serious business, as Erica Eden, PepsiCo’s Director of Global Design Innovation, will tell you. She’s done an enormous amount of work to bring the front-end-of-innovation process into the kingdom of PepsiCo’s snack empire. Last spring, right before speaking at the Front End of Innovation conference, she sat down with Continuum Principal Eric Bogner—who used to sit near Eden when he worked at PepsiCo—to talk about innovation in a humongous organization, designing for women, and empathizing with the aesthetic of people who are very different from you. And now, a few of Eden’s most snackable quotes to get you excited for the main meal of this Resonance Test dialogue…
• “That’s my macro goal: to shift the portfolio to better stuff.”
• “The front-end-of-innovation process” is “changing a lot internally at Pepsico. The teams, particularly marketing teams, insights, R&D, and just overall business leaders are really adopting the new way of thinking.”
• “That’s been my challenge: to make design thinking fun.”
• “These big companies, PepsiCo and others, they’re not necessarily motivated to use their intuition.”
• “It’s hard to stand up in front of the CEO and say: ‘I think this is an opportunity.’ But I think designers do a wonderful job doing that. They build the case behind years of experience—which feels like a hunch, but it really is your years of experience.”
• “When you look at innovation briefs, you see consistently these happy women, eating salads. These false versions of women. They don’t exist. They’re always smiling, they’re always 30. They’re always moderately attractive.”
• “The industry is shy about having these strong opinions about women’s brands.”
• “There’s a disconnect there, between who’s doing all the making and who’s doing all the buying. Right? Men and women. Once you actually break down the numbers, it becomes pretty obvious that there’s a disconnect.”
• “I try not to think about demographic because I don’t think it matters as much as mindset.”
Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
If someone told you that his company was all about “people analytics,” would you understand what that meant? How about if he added: “Sort of like Moneyball for business”? Bet that would make things crystal clear--at least for the multitude of baseball and/or Brad Pitt and/or Michael Lewis fans out there! That is, in fact, how Humanyze’s CEO, Ben Waber, described his firm to Continuum SVP Kevin Young, in the most recent installment of The Resonance Test. In a sprightly digital dialogue, the two talk through such topics as: the use of data in the modern work environment, how privacy functions in Humanyze’s work, and why the U.S. should look into adopting EU privacy standards. If you want to a glimpse into the future of the work place, you should pay attention to this podcast, and note when Waber says:
• “You don't care what Bob’s doing at 2:30 on Tuesday. No one cares. What you care about is: ‘What’s our most productive team do differently that everybody else? How much does management talk to the sales team?’ Those really big questions. That’s what we care about.”
• “Humans, by our very nature, we’re not recording devices. We’re also incredibly inaccurate when I even ask you questions about these things. Who’d you talk to yesterday? Only about 30% accurate.”
• “Essentially our customers use our technology to inject real intelligence into all their different people decisions.”
• “We give people consent forms, that show them the actual database tables we collect. That’s a legal contract between us and our users. That’s important especially in the U.S., to give people legal guarantees around what their rights are with the data.”
• “Because our technology enables you to literally, at a millisecond level, understand what’s going on, you can act that much more quickly.”
• “Just figuring out where somebody is at any given time is not that hard. And you can see how that can be abused—which is why having regulations out in front of that is really critical.”
• “Our average opt-in rate is over 93%, so we’ve gotten quite good at rolling this out. But... you have to take your time, and you have to be transparent about what you’re doing with this data.”
Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
If you want to understand innovation in the financial sector, you talk to Mona Vernon. We know. We did—and we learned quite a bit. As the Chief Technology Officer at Thomson Reuters Labs, Vernon insists that innovation must business-case and use-case focused. Like Continuum, she insists on making it real. In this pointed conversation with our Lee Moreau, Vernon talks clearly and well about demonstrating value, selling innovation to executive leadership, hiring the right people, and managing a properly balanced portfolio of innovation projects. On episode 21 of The Resonance Test, Vernon says many valuable things. It's worth investing the time to hear her say:
• "Fundamentally, one of the values of Thomson Reuters is partnership."
• "If you look at the pace of change in financial markets, trying to do everything yourself doesn't make sense."
• "We are not a group of people playing with toys and foosball. We are actually extremely business-case focused."
• "I don't want your ideas. I want the problem you're seeing with customers."
• "In the process of defining a problem statement, you start seeing the solution."
Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Attendez, Resonance Test fans! Céline Schillinger, Head of Innovation and Engagement at Sanofi Pasteur, injects some Gallic intelligence and passion into this episode of the podcast. Schillinger is all about enabling quality, the full intelligence and autonomy of the people in her organization. She is about healing a system, from a human-centric and social movement perspective. Listen as she and Continuum SVP Jon Campbell talk about how W. Edwards Deming has been misunderstood, the philosophical side of innovation capability, the challenges of behavior change, the workforce of the future, and what it's like for her to have won the Ordre National du Mérite (yes, she is a knight!). Ecoutez, and you'll hear mots such as:
• "We have found that quality works better when it comes from people. When it comes from people's desires, when it comes from them and their head and their heart."
• "My work is about having people regain their full intelligence."
• "We can no longer rely on a system that has a small brain and many, many hands. We need the brain to be present in every cell of the organization."
• "We are not just doing a job. We are fighting for something."
• " When you give up control, you actually reduce risk."
• "We need to work with more people who don't share our ideas, and yet we need to work towards a common goal."
Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Jascha Franklin-Hodge, Boston’s well-known and respected Chief Information Officer, and the co-founder of Blue State Digital, is about to leave his post. As he ends his tenure as Beantown’s CIO, we present this sparkling dialogue, recorded last spring in our studio with Toby Bottorf, our VP of Service and Experience Design. It’s an earnest, intelligent conversation, often punctuated with laughter. Together Franklin-Hodge and Bottorf range all over the intellectual landscape: smart cities, transportation, data, Net Neutrality, Barak Obama, Teddy Roosevelt, privacy, ethics, and "Parks and Recreation." Consider this episode a farewell salute to a terrific digital civil servant, who says:
• “I’m always a little allergic to the term ‘smart cities,’ which kinda comes in and out of vogue but often ends up being shorthand for what, I think, is a sort of thoughtless and industry-driven application of technology to things that don’t have technology applied to them.”
• “You sort of end up sometimes running the risk that you’re up building the sort of Juicero of cities. ‘Let’s take a thing a put a computer on it because we can!’”
• “If you put 40 cameras at an intersection—yes, it’s for safety, but how do we make sure we’re doing that in a way that’s responsible and that respects the privacy needs and wishes of the people who travel through there?
• “We asked people to tell us their question about transportation in Boston. Some people said: ‘Why can’t I have a stoplight at the end of my street?’ and other people said: ‘Why can’t I take a duck boat to work?’ We have this vast spectrum of interest and ideas.”
• “If predictions are right—that autonomous vehicles become a real thing in the next five to ten years—the fundamental ways in which we get around, the ways we use land, the way we think about things like parking, the way we design intersections, the way we design buildings, that are kind of the interface layer between vehicles and people that live in those buildings: all that’s gonna have to change. And anybody that tells you that have that all figured out is lying.”
• “If you don’t stop and have that conversation and ask those questions [about privacy and ethics], you tend to default to just: collect everything. Save everything. Put everything in a central repository somewhere. And I think that is the basis for a lot of this kind of unintended surveillance and, frankly, a lot of security and privacy risk that we haven’t quite wrapped our heads around.”
• “So this idea that, just because you work for a city that it’s OK to build a terrible UI and then be: ‘Oh, we can just send people to training and they’ll be able to figure it out!’ What is the cost of that? If that person starts their day dreading the six clicks they’re gonna have to do every single time they do a task, they’re not gonna be in the right mood. They won’t really have the time to deliver to people.”
• “There’s no right answer when it comes to privacy. It’s a balance. It’s a conversation. It’s always evolving as technology evolves.”
Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Is there room in corporate banking for innovation? For positive psychology? For a llama? If you ask Kelly Fredrickson, an SVP of Ceative at Bank of America, the answer is a major yes! In the latest iteration of The Resonance Test, Fredrickson and our Lee Moreau dig into the creative side of corporate banking. Give us 34 minutes or so, and you’ll get some great remarks from Fredrickson, including these:
• “I actually hate when people say they’re not creative, because I think any problem-solution thought process is actually someone being creative.”
• “The mobile app, which is a really great way to access all that the bank has to offer, is very different than telling somebody: Here’s how you can build a budget. Or Let’s talk about retirement. Let’s talk about planning for your future. The llama fit the mobile app differently.”
• “In a team, if everybody is bringing their authentic self, it raises the opportunity for innovation.”
• On data and permission: “If it feels creepy, then you’ve failed.”
• “We are a giant corporation. But we’re a giant corporation made up of people.”
• “I see people call me, and then hang up. And then call back. They don't think they got me, and then they realize that it’s the llama so they call back to listen to the whole thing.”
Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
“Aging begins the moment we are born.”
This is the profound opening statement one finds on the webpage of Alice Bonner, Secretary of the Massachusetts office of Elder Affairs: http://www.mass.gov/elders/welcomewelcome.html.
When you consider aging an event of a lifetime—for you and every other member of humanity—you develop a thoughtful and creative attitude toward it. You treat it, in a way, like a continuous innovation project. Fact is, our bodies and minds do iterate themselves, incessantly. Being healthy, happy, and well requires, of course, a lifetime of attention, the proper mindset, and sometimes the help and support of other people—various sorts of interventions.
On this, the 17th installment of The Resonance Test, we dig deep into the innovations around aging and digital health. Joining Secretary Bonner for an invigorating discussion is Laurance Stuntz, the Director of the Massachusetts eHealth Institute at MassTech https://masstech.org/about/team/staff/laurance, and Continuum’s SVP, Mike Dunkley. Tune in, and hear Secretary Bonner and Stuntz remark:
• “Aging is not about old people; it’s about families and communities.” —Secretary Bonner
• “Humans are good at empathy, about caring, about so on; technology is really bad at that generally.”—Laurance Stuntz
• “If we don’t get people to start thinking about aging and longevity as a lifespan event, starting at the time that we’re born, then we miss the opportunity for people to, for example, start saving for retirement. Realize how much it takes to save for retirement.” — Secretary Bonner
• “Figure out where the cost is, and then follow that to a viable business model.” —Laurance Stuntz
• “People want to get older and stay and continue to live in the community that’s home for them.” —Secretary Bonner
Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
John Brooks—the managing director of Healthcare Capital, LLC and former president and CEO of the Joslin Diabetes Center—is a something of a legend in the diabetes sector. As much an inventor as an investor, he brings a spirited intelligence and diverse experience to fighting this chronic disease. We’re pleased to welcome him to The Resonance Test. In this energetic conversation, Brooks and Continuum SVP Mike Dunkley range all over the diabetes ecosystem, covering the move from a technological focus to more holistic solutions, how AI and machine learning might provide new opportunities, what future business models might look like, and in general, how we need to develop new approaches to diabetes. Tune in to hear Brooks say:
• “I just have a strong passion to see what I can do to try and help the now 461 million people around the world that have diabetes.... We all look at the numbers. It’s only escalating. We need to think differently.”
• “All of the players need to be in the solution business.”
• “Part of the problem is there hasn’t been a lot of economics to reward helping people not develop a chronic condition.”
• On doctors: “They’ve got 15 minutes to try to come up with something intelligible and if they’re spending 10 minutes to try to get the bottom of it, that’s not a good use of their time.”
• “If the AI enables better understanding of what’s going on with people with diabetes, the key is: How do the healthcare providers, nurse educators, clinicians, partner care doctors, endocrinologists, how do they adopt? Because, at the end of the day, their economics are important.”
Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
How can a gargantuan company force itself to act as scrappy and fast as a startup? In this episode of The Resonance Test, we learn how one of our own clients has managed this—very difficult—feat. Listen as Joy Slabaugh-Hamilton, Head of Service Development within Vanguard Financial Advisor Services™, talks with Toby Bottorf, Continuum’s VP of Service and Experience Design. In the course of their dialogue, you’ll hear Slabaugh-Hamilton say such things as:
• “One of the challenges we have in a big corporation is: deep pockets. You’re not forced to find the skinny, lean, cheap, alternative because there are funds available.”
• “Sometimes you just need an outside person to say it. To point out the emperor is… robe-less.”
• “Sometimes in business, it can be hard to accept and understand that there’s rich insights that come out of talking deeply with a few people—a population that is not statistically significant.”
• “If you can just get one person willing to be willing try something… that demonstration can get help other people change their way of thinking, be a little bit more open-minded and consider other possibilities.”
Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Sridhar Iyengar has been around the innovation block. Several times. With his business partner Sonny Vu, he created the diabetes-care company AgaMatrix, then Misfit wearables, and now he’s the CEO and Founder of Elemental Machines. In a wide-ranging conversation with Continuum SVP Kevin Young, Iygengar’s intelligence shines through, illuminating the worlds of medical devices, consumer health, and tech entrepreneurialism. Among the many wise words of this podcast, you’ll hear these:
· “We did predictive analytics before the phrase was sexy.”
· “What we thought with Misfit is—let’s do something in health and wellness, where we can iterate really quickly without having the regulatory burden. And once we understand the UI and the user experience, we can then put a quality system together and then move that into medical.”
· “We had to design the product in such a way that the Apple decision-maker would fall in love with. So, of course, we mimicked the Apple design language. We actually got a very nice compliment by one of the folks there saying, ‘Wow, this looks like something we would’ve designed.’”
· “Quite simply, our market research involved one intern sitting in front of a laptop for two weeks, and reading every negative review on Amazon for the competing products. We told her: just tell us what the top three complaints are.”
· “There’s no de-bugger for physical processes—and that’s kinda what we’re doing at Elemental Machines.”
· “As somebody runs that assembly line over and over and over again, our system learns where the critical variables are, and then alerts them and basically guides our customers to say: ‘OK, step number 14—the variability there is what’s causing quality problems in your product.’”
· “One of the best ways to spot an opportunity is to solve a problem that you’ve had yourself.”
· “Solving an existing problem is generally not as exciting as working on a new technology. But if you solve an existing problem, it gets a foot in the door, you can build a business, and then you can start investing in the new sexy exiting things that are swirling around.”
Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
It’s not every day that a 1,000-bed floating naval hospital parks across the street from your studio. (From our studio, anyway.) And it’s definitely not every day that said ship’s Commanding Officer invites you aboard for a tour—and then sits down to record a podcast. But all of this recently happened to us, and the result is a superb new episode of "The Resonance Test," featuring the USNS COMFORT’s Commanding Officer Captain Lanny Boswell in conversation with Continuum’s Mike Dunkley. Some highlights from Boswell:
• “In some of these countries where healthcare is few and far between, when we move in, we can impact and change the health of a small country for years, with a three-week stay.”
• “We are in what we call Ready Five status. We have to be prepared from when we’re given a go signal, to be able to throw the lines within five days. That’s our requirement. And we usually do it in three days.”
• The Comfort’s unilateral design creates a “leapfrogging of communication” which is “not done by going up two or three flights of stairs or into another level or into another building. They’re literally down the hall.”
• “The challenges are so intense and so immense, it really is the belief in the mission to begin with that carries the day.”
• “We represent the best of who we are, as a nation, and our alliances. The multiple countries we take on board. We represent the benevolence of a great thought—that we’re all in this together.”
Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
If you love innovation, you must—must!—listen to Innovation Hub, the smart and entertaining radio program that emanates from the WGBH studios in Boston. At The Resonance Test, we admire Innovation Hub and the show’s host and executive editor, Kara Miller. However, this admiration is eclipsed by that of Continuum SVP Jon Campbell, who admits, on this episode of the podcast, to being a fanboy of the show and Miller. Listen up, as he turns the tables on Miller and asks her some great questions—and she says things like:
• H.J. Heinz was “just trying to sell people not just on ketchup or pickles but on the idea that you could buy pre-prepared food, and it was safe to do that and it wouldn’t kill you or anything.”
• “We try to find people who can take a deeper dive than the stuff that is coming at us a hundred miles an hour at us every day.”
• “Makeup for television is terrible to take off. Terrible.”
• “If you wanna think deeply about something, about how you want to change the world or how you wanna create something new, you have to step away for a little while from those emails.”
Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Jessica Helfand resists taking center stage. If anything, she wants to give her place in spotlight to the audience. An author and Yale professor and co-founder of Design Observer, Helfand thinks that the time has come to stop gawking at the stars pontificating the podium and instead start conversations—meaningful ones—with each other. To this end, she recently prototyped something she calls The Next Stage, in our Boston studio. And the moment that experiment ended, our Lee Moreau jogged her over to a conference room to record a podcast reflecting on the experience.
Listen closely, and you’ll hear her say some bright, provocative, and deeply humane things, such as:
• “Performance is fine if it’s theatre. Performance is fine if it’s sports. But why does performance have to happen in social engagement, in personal interaction?”
• “Even failure has become a buzzword. Failure ™.”
• “I love podcasting because just as I loved like this conversation this morning because, the minute you put other people in the mix, the vocabulary changes, and you get much more of a rich soup. There’s more flavors.”
• “The whole point is to spawn better, easier, more mindful, more consistent, more connected ideas in the world. That’s civilization in progress.”
• “Viral is not a word that’s good if you’re an epidemiologist or an immunologist.”
• “Designers are really good at making stuff look cool. At making stuff look shiny. And I don’t think that the world is a shiny place. And so, we would be doing ourselves and each other a disservice if we didn’t ask some ruthlessly objective questions about what that means.”
• “Why are we autodidacts in terms of technology and not of philosophy or ideas?”
• “I write to figure out what I can’t make in the studio. And I make things to figure out what I can’t write. And I teach to keep myself inspired by the ideas of others—and it’s just not enough to do it in the classroom.”
Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Soon Yu is, according to his seven-year-old son, “really goofy, and he drinks way too much Coke.” He’s also an acclaimed speaker and author who trains his vision on what he calls the Iconic Advantage. In the latest vintage of The Resonance Test, our Toby Bottorf gets Yu to unbottle his opinions on the elements of iconic branding, finding untapped value in one’s brand portfolio, the differences between management consultancies and design firms, and learning to own iconic benefit. He also analyzes the reasons Bottorf digs wearing his Adidas Sambas. Tune in and hear Yu say:
• “If it means that our cash cow is gonna basically get milked away and die, that’s OK.”
• “If you can capture the essence of how an Audi makes you feel, then you can design an entire experiential system focused on delivering that feeling throughout the experience journey that consumers have with the product.”
• “Becoming iconic allows you to reach the highest form of branding there is... It goes to what you believe. And when you get into the belief system, and you own it, you are given so much more credit for being trustworthy, for being relevant to ‘me,’ and for being meaningful to ‘me.’”
• “If you really drive iconicity, you’re actually going to be more profitable.”
• “When you have a brand you love… you don’t want to sit on the fence on that, you want to be all in… Your role is to make sure that your consumers are all in for your products. They don’t want to fall out of love with brands they love—they want to stay in love.”
Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Digital health is alive and kicking—and funded—in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts! We know this because Mike Dunkley, Continuum SVP, recently sat down with Nick Dougherry, Program Director of PULSE@MassChallenge, for an episode of The Resonance Test. PULSE is a vibrant new program that, Dougherty says, “actively creates the future of healthcare.” Tune in and hear how PULSE plays matchmaker between aspiring startups and established sponsor organizations, and turns startup ideas and energy into scalable solutions. “The real core of this program is working,” says Dougherty. “These startups and partners are working together in ways that they haven’t been able to do in the past.” How is PULSE different? Well, for one, they brig a whole lot of scientific attitude to the proceedings. “We want to make sure that we’re not just talking about the great work that we’re doing—that we’re measuring it," says Dougherty. “And if we’re off track, we have the data that shows us that we’re off track so that we can course-correct.” And, in a very cool move, PULSE embeds MBA students with their startups, and it’s their task to produce a case study for each new business. Like what you hear? Scroll down and click away…
Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
Have you heard the good news? Chili’s has, at long last, lifted the lifetime ban on The Office's Pam Beesly. To help celebrate this important event, we’re releasing a great podcast conversation Kelli Valade, Chili’s President, recorded with our Lee Moreau months ago. Listen up, and you’ll hear what Valade has to say about leadership, the role of storytelling at Chili’s, and what it’s like to have 70,000 ChiliHeads report to you.
Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
“Biology is awesome!” says Christina Agapakis, Creative Director of Ginkgo Bioworks, the synthetic biology firm, and who would argue with that? Not us. Just the opposite, in fact. The 78th person on Fast Company’s list of the Most Creative People of 2016, Agapakis recently jogged over to record a fine episode of The Resonance Test with Continuum SVP Mike Dunkley. The pair had a fascinating exchange on rational design, user needs, mushroom fungus as furniture material, synthetic biology phobia-phobia, and more.
Tune in to hear Agapakis say things like:
• “We brew these microbes and out of that beer, effectively, we get ingredients that might end up in perfume, in food, in cosmetics, all sorts of different products.”
• In the future, “our computers might not be using DNA, but anything that is made of physical stuff is something that’s going to be potentially impacted by the field of biology.”
• “You have to build not just the understanding of the biochemistry and the understanding of the cells, but you have to also build automated tools to help you access that rapid prototyping.”
• “It’s not like my yeast is going to become a lizard.”
If you build an awesome maker space in Boston’s Innovation District, they will come. That was the hypothesis behind Autodesk's BUILD Space. Filling those 34,000 square feet of robots, water jet cutters, and other assorted items of mechanical awesomeness with people and projects? That's the task of one Rick Rundell. In this edition of The Resonance Test, Rundell and Continuum Principal Lee Moreau chat about how the BUILD space “allows people to fail in interesting ways," the merits of creating an external incubator in-house, and how the Cheesecake Factory uses a water jet to slice, believe it or not, cheesecake.
Should we be surprising and delighting our customers? Thomas A. Stewart and Patricia O’Connell, who co-authored a new volume, "Woo, Wow, and Win: Service Design, Strategy, and the Art of Customer Delight," say, "Erm, let's stick with 'delight'..." Listen to the spirited conversation between our service-minded co-authors and Continuum VP Toby Bottorf to learn how service design connects strategy to customers, the critical importance of delivery, and how the customer is—wait for it—not always right.
Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
On Election Day 2016, Sam Aquillano, Executive Director of Design Museum Foundation, biked over to Continuum’s Boston studio for a conversation with Jon Campbell, our steadfast SVP of Experience and Service Design. Get an earful of these two talking excitedly about the value of public design and the challenges of designing in public. In this freewheeling conversation, the guys rethink everything from the civic meeting process to improving the voting process to starting up, of all things, a print magazine about design—in 2016! They even reminisce about how our two orgs once worked together in an early, trailblazing experiment in transparent design, though Aquillano does admit he was initially “scared as hell to put this process out there.”
John Wilbanks, Chief Commons Officer of Sage Bionetworks, says “the very containers” that we used to put data in, “that kept it human-scale,” have been “blown to bits.” The question is: How do we pick up the pieces and reassemble them in the aftermath? In this "Resonance Test" podcast, Wilbanks and Continuum SVP Mike Dunkley dive down into the many issues surrounding healthcare data. “We basically throw darts at the dartboard with a blindfold on right now," says Wilbanks. “Using data, statistical modeling, and machine learning has to be better than that.” Together, Wilbanks and Dunkley talk about smartphones and increasing sample size in health research, the idea of a “credit union” for data, and the challenge of measuring the success of precision medicine. The work is, for the passionate Wilbanks, a very human-centric activity. “Health is personal," he says. "Experience of disease is personal. Lived experience is personal, and you can start to capture these lived experiences and aggregate them in ways that tell us a lot about disease that we didn’t used to know.”
For the second installment of "The Resonance Test," architect Eric Höweler, of the firm in Höweler + Yoon, and Lee Moreau, Continuum Principal, kibbitz about such things as designing for serendipitous encounters, the sexy-sounding idea of “design desire,” Pennsylvanian submersibles (!), and Continuum’s eye-popping, show-stopping French’s Mustard Yellow floor.
Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon
In the inaugural edition of "The Resonance Test," Rahn Dorsey, the City of Boston’s Chief of Education, talks with Augusta Meill about partnering with Continuum on the High School Redesign project, the purpose of test scores in education, and how design thinking can change, and possibly improve, government.
Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon