The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network

The smartest designers understand the importance of diversity. It’s not about signaling openminded-ness but about achieving the deepest levels of innovation. We’re talking about truly heterogenous, multidisciplinary teams, which is a familiar concept to us. “Imagine if our future teams were just as representative as the beautiful tapestry of people making up this world,” writes Kevin G. Bethune, author of *Reimagining Design: Unlocking Strategic Innovation,* in his recently published volume. But when it comes to investing in such diversity, Bethune, who is our guest on *The Resonance Test,* tells Producer Ken Gordon: “The business community at large has a long way to go.” Bethune knows whereof he speaks. He’s been around all kinds corporate and design cultures. He studied engineering at Notre Dame, business at Carnegie Mellon, and design at ArtCenter; worked on nuclear generators at Westinghouse; designed shoes at Nike; lead design at BCG Digital Ventures; and most recently became the Founder and Chief Creative Officer of dreams • design + life, a think tank for design and innovation. His book is, in fact, an interesting hybrid of professional autobiography, an argument for inclusion, a little philosophy of multidisciplinary design teams, and a career guide. And in it, and in this conversation, he uses his lived experience to showcase how an incessant willingness to learn, to stretch, are necessary for a successful career. “Careers are made by really leaning into your curiosity,” he says. But Bethune also says, in his book on this conversation, that this individual experience needs to be blended into a strong multidisciplinary team. “The collective *we* is better,” he says, because it creates “a greater sense of resilience, greater sense of flexibility, and a greater sense of future foresight than if I didn't have these experiences to offer in the team room.” In fact, Bethune talks about so much relevant things, such as the important role education played in his career, collaboration during a pandemic, and how to create a network of your own, among other salient topics. Much wisdom here, for those who click. Join us. Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

Virtual confusion has been wafting through the 21st century c-suite. Leaders are asking: *Web3? Metaverse? What’s the relationship between the two… and how will it affect our business?* They are frantically trying to sort out the nuances. Are you perhaps such a leader? If so, you’re in luck: We’ve captured a conversation between Alexandra "Sasha" Pitkevich, EPAM’s Blockchain Lead, and Cristina Garcés, CEO of Optiva Media, an EPAM company, that will put the issue into a proper context for you and your organization. In this episode of *Silo Busting,* Producer Ken Gordon put some queries to our experts and their answers, delivered in clear, human-centered language, provide an inside look into what clients know, and need to know, about Web3 and the metaverse. For Pitkevich, much of the confusion is a matter of “bad timing, coincidence, because both terms appeared in the market at the same time.” Part of it is a lack of digital and technological experience. Many people, says Garcés, haven't ever pulled on a VR headset and don't understand the metaverse as “somewhere where they're going to explore, experiment, socialize.” Pitkevitch says that it may be a literary issue, citing Neal Stephenson’s use of the term “metaverse” in *Snow Crash.* For some sci-fi fans, the concept “came not from the reality but from the books.” Plug into their conversation and you’ll learn why a virtual standalone community is not a metaverse, hear about the new vulnerabilities of the metaverse, and consider the issues around data sharing and intellectual property rights. You’ll ponder the central concept of interoperability and dare to think of the pivotal role of community managers (Pitkevitch says of metaverse use cases: “They lace in between brands, they lace in between business units, and they're powered by the community interaction”). This bold, borderless episode will get you ready for a bold, borderless future. Don’t fret; just listen. Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

Passwords are a hassle. But what would it take to live a secure online life without them? This is what Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, and Shaked Vax, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Anonybit, talk about in our latest #CybersecurityByDesign conversation. Listen as they jam on the topic of zero trust and identity as it relates to relevant and tricky ideas such as passwordless technology and biometrics. There are some issues, says Vax, explaining that relying on the biometrics enrolled on one’s smartphone “creates a bit of a false sense of security, in my opinion.” Those biometrics, he says, are “not validated against who they belong to.” Because one can store other fingerprints—those of, say, one’s kids—on a smartphone, this creates “a gap there between the account holder and the biometric on the phone.” There are flaws, Vax says, when the system is not fully connected to a centralized authentication and relies too heavily on phone biometrics. “You truly want to identify and bind that to the end user,” says Rehman, meaning a very specific person and “not just somebody who can unlock the phone.” The big question for Vax is: “How do you do a multi-factor authentication that addresses this gap, this vulnerability around the new phone or the account recovery?” Some fascinating talk here about decentralized data storage and protection, the user experience of passwordless, and the importance of having multiple modalities for different populations. You’ll want to listen—and you’ll be glad that no password is required. Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

Are you SME paring? That is, are you matching up external cloud subject matter experts with your engineers, architects, and security people to deliver a common goal? That’s what Jim Wilt, Distinguished Architect of Digital Strategy & Technology Innovation at a Fortune 100 retailer, does—and it works. Superbly. “The rate at which you increase expertise at that level is tenfold greater than an encompassing program of certification and training,” he says. If you’re curious about the cloud, you should attend to the wisdom of Wilt, Miha Kralj, EPAM’s VP of Cloud Strategy, and Norm Judah, EPAM Advisory Board Member, who are all here on *Silo Busting* for the second installment of our series on cloud mastery (hear the first part here: https://www.continuuminnovation.com/en/how-we-think/blog/you-only-realize-when-you-finish-the-marathon-that-its-actually-a-triathlon). It’s a wisdom, says Judah, that is *evolving*—and one that leaders shouldn’t keep to themselves: “One of the key measures of wisdom is your ability to share the wisdom that you've got and update the wisdom that you have.” And it’s one that requires specific measures of success. When Kralj asks about defining the cloud native mentality approach and results, he gets an interesting answer from Judah: “What is the *consequence* of mastery?” adding: “A consequence of mastery is actually a clearly articulated technical strategy on which we actually land up building and running a series of systems in a fairly broad way.” Listen in to this episode and you’ll walk away with all sorts of cloud-based wisdom including advice on identifying and encouraging technical leaders within one’s organization, some insights into investment strategy, and a deep consideration of the role of the CTO in the complex process of cloud mastery. Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

For many organizations, the cloud is shrouded in mystery. It doesn’t have to be. Cloud mastery isn’t out of reach, but achieving it requires clear thinking, a tolerance for systemic complexity, and a willingness to invest and test. Our latest episode of *Silo Busting*—the first in a two-part series—will help prepare you to scale the cloud’s intimidating edifice. To ascend to a higher level of understanding, listen to the informed but easygoing back-and-forth between experts Jim Wilt, Distinguished Architect of Digital Strategy & Technology Innovation at a Fortune 100 retailer promoting cloud-native solutions via empowered DevSecOps teams; Norm Judah, EPAM Advisory Board Member; and Miha Kralj, EPAM’s VP of Cloud Strategy. Know first that humility is required. “It is absolutely impossible to know everything about everything in the cloud,” admits Judah. “You can know something about everything, and everything about something, but knowing how all the components work is a task that's sort of intractable to normal humans.” And yet, normal humans—particularly those on the IT side of things—need to explain to their business counterparts that, as Kralj puts it: “Cloud is not just a cheaper data center in the sky but actually provides, on its own, an additional business value through greater agility, greater speed, better access to business innovation.” Part of the reason we can move so quickly in cloud is that today’s technology enables rapid experimentation and fast learning. Says Wilt: “I'm learning one hundred ways to not do something so that when I find the two ways to do it, I can go into that with high confidence because I'm an expert at failing at it.” The trio riffs on how the cloud got so complex, the need for continuous education, the importance of aligning technical and business mastery, and more. If you're curious about cloud, get listening! As Judah says, cloud mastery “isn't static—you either get better or you get worse, but you never stay at the same level.” Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

“Zero trust to me is a set of principles, and the degree to which you operate those principles is very much a risk-management exercise,” says Mike Gorman, Head of Security and Compliance at NetFoundry. This remark set the tone for the informed dialogue Gorman recently had with Boris Khazin, our Global Head of DRM Services, in our latest #CybersecurityByDesign conversation. The environment that requires zero-trust networking, Gorman says, is complex. “The more we advance the information age, the more we are struggling to get ahold of our security and the more we are struggling to reach the kind of business agility that we want and all of these competing factors.” Listen to Gorman-Kahzin back-and-forth as it ranges from GDPR and CCPA, to improving the implementation of private networks, to including GRC within the software development lifecycle and the *solution* development lifecycle. These are essential topics that all businesses need to address, whether they recognize the need or not. “Vulnerabilities always exist,” says Gorman. “If you don't know about them, then there's a zero-day out there [and] some security researcher, good or bad, is gonna find it for you.” One way to combat the bad guys: Get into the network early and protect it. “By getting the networking piece right, you can reduce the threat actor space by literally orders of magnitude,” says Gorman. Want to start making your organization less vulnerable? Hit “play.” Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

It’s 2022: Are you ready to jump on a plane? Are your customers? What might it take to make all of us comfortable with the idea of traveling, once again, across the globe? We’ve been thinking about such questions because we’ve been prompted by the insights from *Consumers Unmasked: Stage 2,* part of our longitudinal, international research initiative. In this episode of *The Resonance Test,* Jasmin Guthmann, Senior Director of Global Partner Marketing at Contentstack and Daniel Smythe, Vice President of Retail & Hospitality Consulting for EPAM Continuum, sojourn deep into the topic of contemporary travel. Guthmann herself admits that it’s a tense moment for travel: “I've just come off my first long haul flight myself and the level of anxiety added is incredible.” To offset this, she says, the travel industry must provide “as much certainty as possible.” But the travel challenges aren’t just about pandemic fear and uncertainty; they also include economics. Learning that 44% of *Consumers Unmasked* respondents said they couldn't afford a vacation, Guthmann said: “That's pretty dire,” adding: “I don't think discounts will be the way to go” and that young travel customers “need highly attractive offers,” personalized and customized offers, at “the right price for what [they] want.” Together, Guthmann and Smythe talk intelligently about taking customer experience seriously, the personalization tech can play, staycations and remote work, the importance of privacy for today’s travelers, and travel must do to attain, especially for young customers, “that more playful vibe again.” Host: Macy Donaway Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

Every organization has silos—even ours. But EPAM’s culture is unique in that it allows, even encourages, individuals to disregard silos, take initiative, and connect deeply with others. Lynn Rivenburgh, a VP of Business Consulting at EPAM, is a superb practitioner of silo busting, and in this episode of *Silo Busting,* she talks producer Ken Gordon through her process. While interviewing, Rivenburgh, who was hired in June 2021, asked her interlocutors whom she should connect, and after collective some relevant names: “I did reach out to people on LinkedIn [and] they were super receptive.” Since then, she built on this networking and set up monthly meetings with a number of organizational leaders. Listen and learn about her work with the Women’s Circle, a self-regulated, cross-functional EPAM community: “It's different people all over the organization, at different levels, and [colleagues] not within my practice necessarily, which has been great.” Rivenburgh has enjoyed Circle life—whose Circle is one of eight—because it opens a window into “other parts of the org and how they operate.” The Circle clearly provides much psychological safety (“Whatever is said in the group stays in the group; it’s confidential,” says says) and builds a terrific amount of trust. Her group includes a man, who happens to be the person to whom she reports. Mentorship junior practitioners is a big theme for Rivenburgh. “I think it's not just it's not just the most important thing I do on a daily basis, but I think it's the most rewarding as well,” she says, adding: “My job is to find my successor so I can elevate myself personally within my career.” When Rivenburgh talks about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion work or her—and her six-year-old daughter’s involvement—in the EPAM eKids program https://www.epam.com/careers/blog/learning-from-scratch (“They're reaching out to millions and millions of kids across the globe; the breadth and depth of what they've done from programming language is absolutely incredible, “) you’ll be inspired. In terms of advice for listeners and colleagues: Rivenburgh suggests we willingly banish themselves from the comfort zone and learn to become better networkers and listeners. She concludes with some words about how all her internal networked applies to the outside world as well. She’s insurance expert, she says, but “I'm not a cloud expert, not necessarily a data analytics and predictive modeling expert.” But because she has a great internal network, “I'm able to bring those resources to the table with me to have those conversations with clients.” Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

Data: Organizations have an incessant demand for it, in order to operate and innovate—but at the same time, gathering and analyzing all this data creates legitimate privacy concerns. This is what John Reardon, VP & Senior Director of Global Risk Solutions Technology at Liberty Mutual Insurance, calls the *data paradox,* and he talks about it on our latest episode of *The Resonance Test.* Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, poses some questions to Reardon and Val Tsitlik, EPAM’s Head of Big Data Practice and VP of Technology Solutions, about how the data paradox works in their worlds. Together this data-wise trio talks through the nuances of the data paradox. It’s fascinating in that they chat not just about, say, the relevance of anonymization but the idea of synthetic data (a generated data set that matches the semantics of an actual real data set). Rehman says to Tsitlik that synthetic data allows for testing more closely to real-life scenarios and Tsitlik replies: “I'm almost thinking of this as creating a Sims world”—almost, but not quite, starting a conversation about the metaverse. Listen and learn about data governance in our ever-growing regulatory environment (“It may feel counterintuitive that governance can equal acceleration, but in this space it actually is a key enabler,” says Reardon), tooling (“People always say it's not about the tool, but anybody that actually ever tried to fell a tree with a pocket knife before could tell you sometimes it is about the tool,” notes Rehman), and the always-relevant topic of budgets. Speaking of budgets, if you’re a data or security professional, open up your calendar; you’ll need set aside 30 minutes to listen to this conversation. Host: Glenn Gruber Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

In 2022, Technology evolves fast—faster than the technologists who use it. In order for organizations to put this tech to work for them, they need to have a good understanding of the talent ecosystem, and how to work within it. As Eli Feldman, EPAM’s CTO of Advanced Technology, says, on the latest episode of *Silo Busting:* “Business capabilities are evolving faster than ever and therefore the technology capabilities that support the business capabilities must keep up.” Feldman’s interlocutor is Sandra Loughlin, Managing Principal and Head of Client Learning & Talent Enablement at EPAM, who makes the important point that companies don’t just need to keep their training their employees on new skills, they need to do so longitudinally. When it comes to the issue of developing capabilities, Loughlin says, it needs to “span entire career changes, especially as automation has changed the roles that people have” and raises the questions of “whether those roles even exist” in the future. Back and forth, Loughlin and Feldman go, talking about the importance of training people in a way that makes sense for their business (“Getting the right content to the right people at the right time, right way,” says Loughlin) and applying it to their daily work, aligning skills strategy and capability strategy, the capability academy model, mentorship, EPAM’s learning infrastructure, our approach to assessments (Feldman says EPAM focuses “extensively on making sure that assessment is in reality all about guiding the individual toward their next milestone in their career”), and more. Eavesdrop on Feldman and Loughlin and you’ll soon understand much about creating a healthy talent ecosystem here. Lucky for you, the learning process is as simple as hitting the “play” button. Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon