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Squid Game: The Official Podcast
Squid Game is back, and so is Player 456. In the gripping Season 2 premiere, Player 456 returns with a vengeance, leading a covert manhunt for the Recruiter. Hosts Phil Yu and Kiera Please dive into Gi-hun’s transformation from victim to vigilante, the Recruiter’s twisted philosophy on fairness, and the dark experiments that continue to haunt the Squid Game. Plus, we touch on the new characters, the enduring trauma of old ones, and Phil and Kiera go head-to-head in a game of Ddakjji. Finally, our resident mortician, Lauren Bowser is back to drop more truth bombs on all things death. SPOILER ALERT! Make sure you watch Squid Game Season 2 Episode 1 before listening on. Let the new games begin! IG - @SquidGameNetflix X (f.k.a. Twitter) - @SquidGame Check out more from Phil Yu @angryasianman , Kiera Please @kieraplease and Lauren Bowser @thebitchinmortician on IG Listen to more from Netflix Podcasts . Squid Game: The Official Podcast is produced by Netflix and The Mash-Up Americans.…
Silo Busting 65: Financial Inclusion with Briana Marbury and Alex Jimenez
Manage episode 375792566 series 3215634
Indhold leveret af The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network and EPAM Continuum. Alt podcastindhold inklusive episoder, grafik og podcastbeskrivelser uploades og leveres direkte af The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network and EPAM Continuum eller deres podcastplatformspartner. Hvis du mener, at nogen bruger dit ophavsretligt beskyttede værk uden din tilladelse, kan du følge processen beskrevet her https://da.player.fm/legal.
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
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166 episoder
Manage episode 375792566 series 3215634
Indhold leveret af The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network and EPAM Continuum. Alt podcastindhold inklusive episoder, grafik og podcastbeskrivelser uploades og leveres direkte af The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network and EPAM Continuum eller deres podcastplatformspartner. Hvis du mener, at nogen bruger dit ophavsretligt beskyttede værk uden din tilladelse, kan du følge processen beskrevet her https://da.player.fm/legal.
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
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1 Silo Busting 69: Neatsun Ziv and Sam Rehman on the Balanced Approach to Risk Management 21:49
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21:49What 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 says 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 to better focus your cybersec priorities! Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon…
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1 The Resonance Test 94: Angela Stockman on GenAI in Education 27:45
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27:45“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 Kristin 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 Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon…
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1 The Resonance Test 93: The Lab of the Future with Sridhar Iyengar and Chris Waller 29:39
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29:39We’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.” 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 Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon…
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1 The Resonance Test 92: Lessons from a Maverick with Uma Gopinath and Macy Donaway 32:14
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32:14“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 Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon…
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1 The Resonance Test 91: Open Source with Christopher Spalding, Rachel Fadlon, and Chris Howard 30:54
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30:54“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,* 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 Kocian Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Executive Producer: Ken Gordon…
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1 The Resonance Test 90: Responsible AI with David Goodis and Martin Lopatka 32:48
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32:48Responsible 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 Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon…
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1 The Resonance Test 89: Guest Speaker Rowan Curran and Elaina Shekhter on Generative AI 39:47
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39:47Can 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 Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon…
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1 Silo Busting 68: Cloud IR Readiness with Ron Konigsberg, Sam Rehman & Aviv Srour 36:51
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36:51“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 Kocian Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon…
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1 The Resonance Test 88: Scott Loughlin, Sam Rehman, and Brian Imholte on Privacy, Education, and AI 41:44
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41:44Sam 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 Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon…
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1 Silo Busing 67: Andrew Whaley and Sam Rehman on App Security 25:28
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25:28Going 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 Gruber Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon…
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1 Silo Busting 66: Operating in Ukraine with Stepan Mitish and Elaina Shekhter 30:49
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30:49In 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 Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon…
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1 The Resonance Test 87: Health Equity Solutions with Dr. Djinge Lindsay & Arianne Graham 31:49
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31:49Equity 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 Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Executive Producer: Ken Gordon…
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1 Silo Busting 65: Financial Inclusion with Briana Marbury and Alex Jimenez 29:56
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29:56Financial 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…
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1 Silo Busting 64: Generative AI Data Security Fundamentals with Sam Rehman and Val Tsitlik 35:33
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35:33The 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…
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1 Silo Busting 61: A Clear View of Cloud Security with Yinon Costica, Sam Rehman, and Aviv Srour 42:16
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42:16The 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…
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1 Silo Busting 63: Financial Literacy with Theodora Lau and Alex Jimenez 27:35
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27:35When 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…
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1 Silo Busting 62 Human Testing and Generative AI with Tariq King and Ira Livshits 24:04
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24:04The 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, our 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…
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1 The Resonance Test 86: Michael Smith, CIO of The Estée Lauder Companies 28:48
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28:48When it comes to empowering women—truly empowering them—The Estée Lauder Companies is doing something different. We know this because Michael Smith, CIO of ELC, 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 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 Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon…
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1 The Resonance Test 85: Insurance, Data, and Analytics 22:49
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22:49The 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,” says 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 Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon…
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1 Silo Busting 60: Gamification and Digital Banking with John Findlay and Alex Jimenez 32:12
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32:12If 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 MacAllister Executive Producer: Ken Gordon…
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1 Silo Busting 59: Bruce Schneier and Sam Rehman on Hacking in the Era of Generative AI 25:34
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25:34On 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 Donaway Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon…
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1 Silo Busting 58: Responsible AI in Financial Services with Kathryn Hughes and Alex Jimenez 33:06
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33:06When 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 Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon…
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1 Silo Busting 57: Assessing the State of Today’s SOC Teams 33:00
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33:00Not *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 Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon…
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1 Silo Busting 56: The Business Value of Cloud with Eli Feldman and Miha Kralj 35:57
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35:57There'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... 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 Gruber Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon…
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1 Silo Busting 55: Talent in the Age of Generative AI with Sandra Loughlin and Alexandra Diening 27:52
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27:52Everybody'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 Alexandra 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. Diening 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 Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon…
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The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network
1 Silo Busting 54: Tom Novak and Alex Jimenez on Digital Transformation in a Turbulent Time 31:30
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31:30Now 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 Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon…
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1 Silo Busting 53: Mandeep Khera and Sam Rehman Go Passwordless 21:32
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21:32It’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 Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon…
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1 Silo Busting 52: Chris Karageuzian and Alex Jimenez on Lending and Automation in a Tough Economy 24:20
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24:20May 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 will work 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 Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon…
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1 Silo Busting 51: Jay Parikh and Sam Rehman on Bringing More Builders into Cybersecurity 29:04
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29:04The cloud may have made business more flexible, but it has made security *complicated.* According to Jay Parikh, 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 to 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 rethink 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 Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon…
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1 Silo Busting 50: Frank Sorrentino and Alex Jimenez on Customer-Centric Banking 34:22
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34:22“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…
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1 Silo Busting 49: Lynn Rivenburgh and Sam Rehman on Insurance and Cybersecurity 26:52
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26:52Insurance 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…
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1 Silo Busting 48: Chase Petrey and Alex Jimenez on Digital Payments 38:24
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38:24So 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…
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1 Silo Busting 47: Pierre Kremer and Chris Hosmer on Customer Loyalty 29:26
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29:26Loyalty: 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…
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1 The Resonance Test 84: Consumers Unmasked Home Insights with Jen Jones and Mario Crippa 26:45
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26:45Home, 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…
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1 Silo Busting 46: M&A and Cybersecurity with Sam Rehman, Sobhith Grandhi, and Adam Bishop 22:39
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22:39When 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 Head of Security Advisory, 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…
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1 Silo Busting 45: Liz High and Alex Jimenez on Personalization in Banking 28:10
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28:10This 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…
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1 The Resonance Test 83: Consumers Unmasked Fashion Insights with Michelle Grant and Pierre Kremer 32:59
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32:59It’s a weird moment for fashion. Think about 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: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon…
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1 Silo Busting 44: Cloud Operating Models with Miha Kralj and Sandra Loughlin 25:56
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25:56*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…
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1 Silo Busting 43: ESG, Privacy, and Security with Michelle Dennedy and Sam Rehman 25:23
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25:23“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…
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The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network
1 The Resonance Test 82: Mitch Resnick of the Scratch Foundation 26:18
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26:18If 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…
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The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network
1 Silo Busting 42: Designing the Responsible Metaverse Part II w/Jonathan Lupo & Dr. Alexandra Diening 26:03
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26:03Last 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…
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1 The Resonance Test 81: Céline Schillinger, Author of “Dare to Un-Lead” 38:52
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38:52“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…
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The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network
1 Silo Busting 41: Designing a Responsible Metaverse with Dr. Alexandra Diening and Jonathan Lupo 24:57
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24:57The 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 creates (social, psychological, 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…
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1 The Resonance Test 80: Dr. Bryan Vartabedian on the Provider Experience in Remote Care 41:08
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41:08Nowadays, 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…
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1 The Resonance Test 79: Kevin Bethune, Author of “Reimagining Design” 33:11
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33:11The 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…
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1 Silo Busting 40: Web3 vs. Metaverse with Sasha Pitkevich and Cristina Garcés 30:16
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30:16Virtual 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…
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1 Silo Busting 39: Zero Trust and Identity with Shaked Vax and Sam Rehman 22:07
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22:07Passwords 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…
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The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network
1 Silo Busting 38: Cloud Mastery, Part II, with Jim Wilt, Norm Judah, and Miha Kralj 30:13
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30:13Are 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…
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The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network
1 Silo Busting 37: Cloud Mastery, Part I, with Jim Wilt, Norm Judah, and Miha Kralj 26:19
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26:19For 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…
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1 Silo Busting 36: Zero-Trust Networking with Mike Gorman and Boris Khazin 27:31
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27:31“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…
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1 The Resonance Test 78: Consumers Unmasked Travel Insights with Jasmin Guthmann and Daniel Smythe 25:18
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25:18It’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…
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1 Silo Busting 35: How Lynn Rivenburgh Breaks EPAM’s Silos 21:38
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21:38Every 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…
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1 The Resonance Test 77: The Data Paradox with John Reardon, Val Tsitlik, and Sam Rehman 35:32
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35:32Data: 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…
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1 Silo Busting 34: Tackling the Talent Ecosystem with Sandra Loughlin and Eli Feldman 31:24
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31:24In 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…
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The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network
1 Silo Busting 33: Defining Web3 with Sasha Pitkevitch and Érica Moreti 30:41
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30:41The 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…
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The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network
1 The Resonance Test 76: Hannah Zeavin, Author of *The Distance Cure* 37:16
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37:16“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…
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The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network
1 The Resonance Test 75: Restaurant Insights from Consumers Unmasked 29:34
29:34
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29:34In 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…
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The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network
1 The Resonance Test 74: David Rose, author of "SuperSight" 35:26
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35:26In 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…
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The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network
1 The Resonance Test 73: Michael Gunn of Vanguard 26:57
26:57
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26:57What 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…
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The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network
1 The Resonance Test 72: Ricardo Álvarez, Co-Author of "Urban Play" 48:25
48:25
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48:25It’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…
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