Cloudbusting Podcast

In this episode of Cloudbusting we are joined by Carl Uminski from digital experience agency, Somo, to discuss the influence that COVID-19 is having on customer expectations and digital experiences.

Carl considers how businesses can achieve true resilience by building an engaging digital touchpoint with customers that provides a seamless, end-to-end user experience. He also discusses how being a product-led organization is essential to achieving this.

On today's show, founder of Imaginactive Fitness, Adele Andersen joins Jez and Dave to discuss the role that technology is playing in keeping people fit and healthy during lockdown. 

Adele shares the story behind her excer-tainment mobile app: Apocolypse Survival Training and the team considers the role technology will play in the fitness industry post-COVID-19.

Jonathan Allen, Director of Enterprise Strategy at AWS, is our guest for today's episode. After leading enterprise cloud transformation projects in previous roles, Jonathan now travels around the world helping AWS customers navigate their cloud journeys.

He joins Dave and Jez to share some of the insights presented in his new book: 'Reaching Cloud Velocity'. The book provides readers with leadership best practices for cloud transformation and highlights some powerful lessons learned from those who have gone before.

In this episode, Leahanne Hobson, Founder & CEO at Alinea Partners, joins Jez and Dave to share her experience of using fluid teams to help deliver a superior and tailored service for her clients.

Leahanne discusses the benefits of assembling the ideal skillsets on a job-by-job basis, where flexibility and empowerment are crucial and the focus is on outcomes rather than processes. She also discusses the challenges with scaling this approach, as well as the importance of recruiting a team with the right mindset.

In this episode, Nicola Millard, Principal Innovation Partner at BT, returns to the pod to continue our discussion around the impact of COVID-19 on working life and the technology we are using to continue collaborating at a distance. Nicola shares some insights from a recent White Paper she published ‘A Practical Guide To Successful Homeworking’. She makes some predictions about pre-COVID office etiquette. She also provides a glance at the Inverness Experiment - BT’s first experiment with remote working back in 1992 (Does anyone fancy a home video-phone the size of a small fridge?).

When organizations face a crisis, there is often a tendency for leaders to behave rigidly and increase the level of control over processes. When the crisis involves rapidly changing external factors, much like the current pandemic, this lack of flexibility can do more harm than good.

In this episode of Cloudbusting, the team is joined by Rhys Smith, a Principal Consultant at the McChrystal Group. Rhys explains how keeping your teams engaged and enabling autonomy can be a far more effective method of maintaining and improving productivity.

The current pandemic has amplified the pressure of making the right decisions at the right time. Sophie Devonshire (CEO at The Caffeine Partnership) joins Jez and Dave today to discuss the 'need for speed' in leadership decision making, as well as the importance of purpose when trying to engage your teams to follow your decisions. She also explains why momentum trumps perfection when it comes to innovating quickly.

In this episode of Cloudbusting, writer, speaker, and strategist, Lauren Razavi joins Jez and Dave to discuss the medium and long-term impacts that COVID-19 pandemic will have on the way people work.

Lauren predicts how business processes and cultures could change to accommodate more flexible, distributed workforces. She also suggests that we will stop thinking about job satisfaction in terms of work-life balance and instead consider work-life integration.

To what extent will remote-first work policies become the norm? Will we see more digital nomads who travel while they work? How could ultra-flexible working impact cities and urban policies?

In this episode, Jez & Dave are joined by Nelson Wootton, CEO at SaaScada to discuss the impact of COVID-19 on the FinTech sector.  The team discusses the changing financial behaviors of consumers and businesses over this troubling period. They also predict how social distancing will influence invesment in the digital touchpoints of traditional, bricks-and-mortar financial institutions, whose digital experience has lagged behind emerging FinTech players.

In this episode, Jez and Dave are joined by Melika Golkaram, Hybrid Cloud Specialist at Google Cloud, to discuss the various services and architectures that can help your business enable scalability, flexibility, and agility to respond to changing demands. Melika explains how microservices and utilizing technologies like containers, Kubernetes and service meshes, can help your applications run securely, reliably and efficiently in times of uncertainty and crisis.