The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network

When you think of the term “mergers” what comes next? “Acquisitions,” of course! But what follows after that? How about… “cybersecurity”? Does that concept immediately pop to mind when thinking about M&A? According to the latest #CybersecurityByDesign episode of Silo Busting, it should—but perhaps this isn’t always the case. Listen as Sam Rehman, EPAM’s Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, interrogates Sobhith Grandhi, our Head of Technology for M&A, and Adam Bishop, our 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

This time, it’s personal. Welcome to the premier installment of #TakeItToTheBank, our new series of financial services conversations on *Silo Busting.* In this episode, Liz High, co-author of *Think like a Brand, Not a Bank: 5 Practical Strategies to Unlock Innovation, Connect with Customers, and Grow,* and Alex Jimenez, Managing Principal, Financial Services Consulting at EPAM, get into how banks do, and should, approach personalization. High says that banks need to do a better job of understanding that “brands and the customer experiences you build have to feel personal” and that banks shouldn’t be customer-first. “If your decision-making framework is either bank first or customer first, you're never gonna get to [a] fair exchange of value,” she says, “because no [one element is] more important than the other.” Jimenez notes that even when banks go to market with a customer-first message, “ROI is always going to come first, despite the mission being all about the customer or all about the member.” Together the note that lifecycle and lifestyle marketing isn’t personalization. When banks try to sell mortgages to 21-year-olds there’s a disconnect because, as Jimenez says: “You're not doing the hard work of really understanding your customer.” The talk about the importance of using data to look forward rather than backward (“Your rear-view mirror is smaller than your windscreen for a reason,” says High, quoting her co-author) and for managerial purposes: “That mind shift needs to be throughout the organization and not just in marketing and customer service and customer experience, but it also needs to be in the back office,” Jimenez says. They get into niche banking (did you know there’s a bank dedicated to musicians?) and analyze the evolution of community banking. High says the contemporary idea of community is about “moving away from geography and moving into emotion and moving into brand.” If you want to spend time learning about neobanks, fintech, and charters (“the most valuable thing in that whole ecosystem is, the bank charters,” says High), then this is the conversation for you. Now visit the link below, withdraw the conversation, and collect your dividends! Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

It’s a weird moment for fashion. Think about 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

*Cloudy with a strong chance of organizational change.* That’s the forecast for just about every business right now. The cloud brings both great promise and the potential for disruption. Sadly, few companies understand how to prepare their IT ecosystems for such a storm of transformation. Luckily for them, our guests on Silo Busting, Miha Kralj, EPAM’s VP of Cloud Strategy, and Sandra Loughlin, our Chief Learning Scientist, are here to speak about what takes to master cloud operating models. Loughlin defines a cloud operating model as “a mental checklist of all of the things that need to be considered and addressed when making substantive changes to how your organization operates. So this is, very simply put: people, process, tools, and data.” Kralj, who tells Loughlin he prefers “real operating systems instead of buggy human operating systems that you are expert in,” says an operating model is “the way how you run IT. It's a definition of business of IT inside an enterprise.” Together they put the idea of the cloud operating model through its paces. They call about how cloud has brought IT back in-house… and about the complexity of factoring human employees into the equation. They talk about matching new skills to business needs and growing and training cloud-era IT talent. “How are we helping organizations to go from front-of-the-conveyor belt, blue-collar workers, to become actual knowledge workers in this new IT operator model?” asks Kralj. Loughlin responds by talking about automation, employees, skills and skill gaps, career paths, and more. This episode will instruct you about two-speed IT (“It might be easy to think in terms of that dichotomy, but in terms of an actual application and real-world practice, it's not a good thing at all,” says Loughlin) and the challenges of helping companies manage the transition from legacy to cloud systems. Stick around until the end you’ll hear our duo’s best practical tips for dealing with what Kralj calls the “never-ending continuous change cycle that is ahead of us.” Host: Macy Donaway Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

“I have always looked at a safe environment as part of what needs to be in a healthy environment,” says Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, on the latest #CybersecurityByDesign conversation. To which Michelle Dennedy, CEO of PrivacyCode, co-author of *The Privacy Engineer's Manifesto,* and our latest podcast guest, responds: *I love what you're saying, Sam. You want your family, you want your co-workers, you want your life to be safe and secure. Well, the best way to do that of course is to dig a bunker. But if you want them to live and you want your kids to leave the nest and forge out it, it involves risks…. It involves human interaction and learning the skills to be resilient when you're talking to other people who are also not living in their bunkers.* This episode is a fortunate and enlightening meeting of the minds. Dennedy and Rehman talk through what it means to consider privacy and security in the context of ESG. Dennedy, the former Chief Privacy Officer at Cisco, defines privacy with lawyerly precision as “the authorized processing of personal or personally identifiable information according to moral, ethical, legal, and sustainable principles.” She encourages board members and CEOs to ask themselves questions such as: “Are we choosing to protect stories, data, artifacts, about the human beings with whom we're interacting, whether they're your employee, or your customer?” Together they talk about the importance of bringing the human factor into ESG conversations. Says Rehman: “If you look at data just as data—It's a database, it's a file, what do I care, I'm just gonna churn it”—that's not how things are, and you *know* that. People know that.” It’s a lively dialogue that swerves into the topic of the emotion of security and governance in the era of non-stop WFH video conferencing (Dennedy raises the issues this way: “What does it mean to my workforce, if they can work securely anywhere they are? Does that change the character of the data about them that's coming in through all of these channels?”). Listen to discover the many new questions business leaders are asking, what wicked privacy is all about, and more. Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

If you have a child (a young sibling, cousin, student, or even friend) in your life, chances are you know about Scratch—the wildly popular graphical program language that kids use to dream up interactive stories, games, and animations. But it’s entirely possible you don’t know the man behind Scratch, Mitch Resnick, the LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Lab, or that the Scratch Foundation has a strong, long-term relationship with EPAM. After listening to the latest iteration of *The Resonance Test,* in which Resnick and Shamilka Samarasinha, EPAM’s Global Head of Corporate Social Responsibility, answer questions from producer Ken Gordon, that ignorance will instantly evaporate. The episode digs into the reasons why Scratch is, and always has been, a free program (“We didn't want there to be barriers for young people to get access to Scratch,” says Resnick) and how Scratch helped children during Covid (the first year of the pandemic saw the number of Scratch projects double and the number of comments the kids wrote on each other’s projects increase fivefold). You’ll hear about Scratch and the kids of Ukraine. Says Resnick: “In early March, 10 days after the invasion of Ukraine, I got a message from an educator in Ukraine named Olesia Vlasii.” Vlasii had the idea to use Scratch to create what she called Waves of Kindness. The result: A Waves of Kindness gallery on the Scratch website “where kids from around the world could upload projects about how you could spread kindness,” says Resnick. Within days, Waves of Kindness featured “literally thousands of projects from kids around the world.” The conversation also touches on how Scratch engages a wide ecosystem of learners to promote diversity and inclusion in expanding education and how EPAM’s partnership with Scratch fits into our other ESG activities. “In the social impact space, obviously education is one of our core areas,” says Samarasinha. Finally, Resnik and Samarasinha talk about the evolving relationship between the Scratch Foundation and EPAM—our EPAM E-Kids program has expanded from four to 19 countries—and the upcoming virtual Scratch Conference. It’s a conversation that your kid will want you to hear. So listen! Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

Last time on *Silo Busting,* Dr. Alexandra Diening, EPAM’s Head of Research & Insights for EMEA, introduced us to the concept of the responsible metaverse. This time, she turns the virtual tables and interrogates Jonathan Lupo, EPAM Continuum’s VP of Experience Design, about his own experience as a responsible designer. Lupo, who was in Covid quarantine during the recording of this episode, says that the metaverse provides “distraction therapy—I need to escape the bedroom” and then reaches, empathically, beyond his own experience: “But there are patients who need to escape a hospital.” He says that being trapped in his bedroom with VR has been “both a blessing and a curse,” but this made him realize that “our point of origin is kind of all messed up when it comes to metaverse thinking and really dissimilar to how we envision great customer experiences. Which is: We start with a problem.” Another issue: The metaverse requires designers to evolve to a 3D mindset. Lupo talks of the presence of 2D paradigms in contemporary VR experiences, adding that these “screen-based paradigms shoved in there don't feel right.” Of course, because we’re bringing humans into deeply immersive experiences, a lot is at stake, and this is reflected in Lupo’s general ethos: “To me, the guiding experience principle when designing for VR or 3D is: How do we keep people safe?” He’s rightly concerned with making sure people are guided properly and carefully through virtual worlds, how to avoid making them sick, how to ensure that they feel in control of their own movement. “How do we provide a set of physics that the user understands?” Listen and learn about the new skills involved in designing the metaverse—and when organizations can do quick upskilling or when they need perhaps to think about acquisition. Often, Lupo says, companies are focused on creating the ideal future state, but when it comes to the metaverse, he suggests the responsible thing also requires companies to “envision the worst experience that could happen, what could go wrong” and then “safeguard around that.” The metaverse is a brand-new, brave new world, and Lupo sums up his honest feelings here, saying that it’s “exciting, exhilarating, thrilling, and terrifying to me.” Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

“I rebel, therefore we exist,” wrote Albert Camus in 1951. Céline Schillinger, Founder and CEO of We Need Social, writes in her new volume, *Dare to Un-Lead. The Art of Relational Leadership in a Fragmented World:* “This phrase could sum up the essence of this book.” In this episode of *The Resonance Test,* Schillinger and Producer Ken Gordon talk it through. Schillinger believes conventional leadership’s day is over and that relational leadership is the way forward. “I think we've lost sight of just very basic values that make people thrive and excel, which are related to freedom and equality among people and a sense of chosen togetherness,” she says. She understands what it’s like to operate in corporate culture. Schillinger was a self-propelled change agent at Sanofi (“My entry point into active positive rebellion was the fight for a greater diversity in the workplace”) and has taken her experiences, mixed them with some wide-ranging reading, and developed a philosophy of leadership structured on the famed Gallic triumvirate of *liberté,* *égalité,* and *fraternité.* In the conversation, Schillinger talks about the challenges of making her kind of change in big organizations. It isn’t, interestingly, a business issue but a cultural one. “It's very easy to make the business case. That's the easiest part, I would say.” The truly difficult part? Getting leaders accept the risk, she says. The conversation is lively and anything but stiff. Schillinger is as happy talking about how people have misread W. Edwards Deming as she is criticizing... performance evaluations. “You don’t like them; I don’t like them,” says Gordon of evals. “I hate them,” says Schillinger, adding: “No one ever questions the fundamental idea at the core of this.” She suggests that a company’s time and resources would be much better spent “if instead we got together as a team and evaluated our system [asking]: How do we work together? What is the quality of our collective work, and how can we make it better?” Schillinger talks about both the value of networks and her skepticism toward today’s social networks. She even gives some useful career advice to all the change-agents and would-be change agents out there. We’re pretty sure that you’ll relate. Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

The metaverse business is booming! Companies are scrambling into the virtual world to claim a space of their own and set up shop as fast as they can. Dr. Alexandra Diening, Head of Research & Insights for EMEA, says they need to slow down. She introduces our Jonathan Lupo, VP of Experience Design, in the latest episode of Silo Busting, to a powerful and relevant idea she calls the “responsible metaverse.” Diening talks about the metaverse “opens new pathways for potential risks” and what we can do to close them off. Learn about the new vulnerabilities the metaverse 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

Nowadays, everyone in healthcare is talking telemedicine… except for maybe Dr. Bryan Vartabedian, Chief Medical Officer of Texas Children's Hospital North Austin, founder of *33 Charts,* author of several books, and a previous *Resonance Test* guest, who prefers the term “remote care.” He finds it a flexible term because it encompasses more than the conventional idea of care through a screen. One can certainly provide remote care via phone call, text, or email. “It’s important to think about the different modalities of remote care because different circumstances call for different modalities,” Vartabedian tells our Jonathon Swersey on the latest episode of *The Resonance Test.* But the challenge is not just about the varieties of treatment—there’s also the matter of training. Vartabedian says “We have this embarrassment of riches of technology,” adding that much of this tech is doled out to providers “without any real instruction or discussion or dialogue about how we're going to use these tools.” Problems arise when providers use “the wrong tool for the wrong problem” and “things get really kind of challenging and difficult.” And let’s not get started on the data! “There's this constant stream of information, and the challenge for us is: How do we harness that? How do we consolidate that to certain times of the day? It's almost a design problem,” Vartabedian says, sounding very much like a designer. This fine conversation skis around the idea of data governance, training patients to use MyChart messaging, the difficulty of setting universal standards for communication tools. They talk about what’s been gained (access) and lost (human connection) in a remote-first world. They talk about being sensitive to the interests of the end user. They talk about the importance of touch in the examination process: “It's a form of communication,” says Vartabedian. It's a deep, informed, and at times personal conversation about how going remote has changed the face of healthcare for practitioners. Get close to their dialogue by clicking below. Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon