Tanzu Talk

Duke Energy has been working on their software capabilities for some time now. They've recently reached a milestone by opening a brand new innovation center in Charlotte. Coté took a tour of it recently checking out the numerous product teams and their approach to exploring and building strategy, all the way from corporate strategy down to writing code. John also shares a couple of new examples of how lean product management and design in action. Also: gingham.

This week our guests are Dan Stevenson and Brandon Zaharoff from Shields Health Solutions, a maker of software solutions for the specialty pharmacy industry. Dan and Brandon talk about the challenges of developing and running a specialty pharmacy, how Shields' software helps ensure patients are taking their medications as directed, and how and why Shields adopted cloud-native software development to build and evolve its flagship product, TelemetryRX.

Few organizations have or rely on as much software the US Air Force. There's plenty of it around and, thus, plenty to be improved. In recent years, one of the more spectacular digital transformation stories has come from the USAF's work modernizing their Air Operations Control software. In this episode, USAF's Bryon Kroger goes over how they've moved multi-year release cycles to just weeks in the Kessel Run projects. Much of the work is in the "fuzzy front" end of planning and procurement, but as Bryon says, an equally, hearty serving has to do with building up people's skills, moral, and the overall culture.

This week, Pivotal's Mik Freedman and Joey Sabani, both members of the Agile Practice Leadership Enablement team, join Jeff and Dormain to talk about Pivotal's joint work with Accenture, the global consulting firm. This includes collaboration in Accenture's Innovation Hub in Columbus, Ohio, where Pivotal and Accenture work side-by-side with clients to help them scale their digital transformations.

Knate-ive by Pivotal Software

How's your year go? Pretty good? Well, regardless, it's almost over, so that means it's time for some predictions! Before Richard and Coté go over some hopes and dreams for 2019, they review some 2018 predictions. Some didn't work out at all, some were exactly correct, but, as always, most of them were in the ballpark.

Also, the mystery of why we have a flat-head screw driver when the phillips is so clearly superior.

In this week's episode of Pivotal Conversations, Dormain and Jeff chat with Greg Meyer, a distinguished engineer at Cerner, a maker of healthcare software. Greg talks about a new specification he helped develop to achieve interoperability and easier data movement between healthcare systems. He also explains how the company is modernizing its development practices to increase the pace of innovation.

Flexible software usually means well modularized software. Instead of one big ball of code, you want to create components that work together. Dividing up your application into those components has always been a bugbear of design and it's what domain-driven design (DDD) is trying to solve. In this episode, Coté talks with Jakub Pilimon to figure out what DDD is, plus how event storming is used to find domains. Also, outside of Poland, is it "evangelist" or "advocate"?

There's few tasks harder than refactoring a large organization, but that's exactly what we're asking management to do in all this digital transformation hoopla. Existing organizations are tremendously conflicted and tied up in competing incentives already, and then when you try to shift to a product team driven approach, things go even more haywire. Here, Richard & Coté talk with Pivotal's Carl Coryell-Martin who's been pulling apart that bureaucratic bowl of spaghetti for many years now.

From all the stories at SpringOne Platform you get the feeling that every organization out there is doing a real bang-up job with improving their software capabilities. Of course, it's not actually everyone out there, but each year we hear about more enterprises and government agencies that are using their own, custom written software to improve their business and operations. In this episode, Richard and Coté go over some of their highlights from SpringOne Platform 2018, cover some of the news (PCF 2.3 and PKS 1.2), and a few other news items in the infrastructure and cloud world.