The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network

Let’s talk about vulnerability, and not the Brené Brown sort. We mean software. Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, says in a new #CybersecurityByDesign episode of *Silo Busting:* “Software *will* have vulnerabilities… The only question is: Can they be used?” In an informative conversation with producer Ken Gordon, Rehman argues for reconfiguring software development lifecycle—or SDLC, as they say in the vernacular—“so that security is actually engrained into the process, not as a stop-and-go, stop-and-go method but it’s actually built in and is continuous.” Rehman believes in incessantly reassessing one’s organization’s threat profile, as inputs and outputs change over time. Why? The moment any organization, including yours, releases a piece of software—“That’s an entry point to the enterprise.” Rehman says that secure SDLC “is for everybody.” Question is: Is that a group to which you and your organization belong? You know the answer.

Host: Alison Kotin

Engineer: Kip Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

Peter Senge—the renowned architect of systems thinking and author of the 1990 classic, *The Fifth Discipline*—doesn’t love the word “system.” “I always try to kind of demystify the word ‘system,’ because that's a bit of a problem we've always had,” he says on the most recent episode of *The Resonance Test.* “System is an off-putting word.” This is, in fact, one of many surprises nestled in his lively conversation with Rick Curtis, Senior Director of EPAM Continuum, and Paul McCormick, a Principal Consultant at EPAM. Senge’s holistic and humanistic worldview plays nicely off of Curtis-and-McCormick’s pleasantly British style of inquiry. He speaks in mini-lectures about systems thinking (of course), adaptivity, innovation, competition, collaboration, and data in a slightly hoarse but consistently positive voice. Senge is both informative—he teaches us that Latin root for the word “compete” means “striving or seeking together”—and a skilled, off-the-cuff aphorist. Press play and hear him say (among other things):

“Deep change never starts with a majority. Revolutions always start with small numbers. The real changes always start on the periphery of the mainstream.”

“Even direct competitors have to work together to create healthy market conditions, which in turn can allow them to compete.”

“What we often call human nature, I would call habit—collective habits of thinking and acting. And that's culture.”

“You can throw away the word ‘system’ entirely and just talk about [how] we live in webs of interdependence, where my wellbeing depends a lot on yours, and we're continually influencing each other.”

“The basic element is awakening people's intuitive understanding that we always live in an interdependent interconnected reality.”

“Competition and collaboration are natural sisters. They go together. And that's true in business just as well.”

Host: Kyle Wing

Engineer: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

Dustin Boutet, our Travel and Hospitality Vertical Lead, thinks about seniors and their driving habits. A lot. Joseph Coughlin, Director of the MIT AgeLab and author of *The Longevity Economy,* happens to share his obsession… and he’s been pondering it since before Boutet had a driver’s license.

Which is we had the pair take *The Resonance Test* out for a spin together.

Coughlin clears up some common misconceptions with his to-the-point pronouncements. On the topic of age and driver safety, he says, “Birthdays do not predict anything. In fact, birthdays do not kill; health conditions do,” adding sensibly: “I think that we really need to think about driving performance and wellbeing across the lifespan.”

He talks about how today’s cars designed for a “pilot,” and a specific one at that: “about 5’10”, 27-year-old male, both in terms of the structure of the vehicle as well as the toys and the technologies behind the dash.”

Together the pair circle around Silverkey, the EPAM Continuum concept project that aims to keep older drivers on the road safer and longer, the AgeLab’s work on BMW’s iDrive, and those tricky conversations (Coughlin calls them “exceedingly conflictual, emotional conversations”) families must sometimes have around senior driving.

Things get philosophical, fast. “Driving is far more than getting from point A to B,” Coughlin tells Boutet. “That would be a nice, easy urban planning problem to solve. In fact, it’s about independence and security.“

Hop in, and get an earful about what it means to age in the passenger seat.

Host: Kyle Wing

Engineer: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

People, generally speaking, have the wrong idea about disability… or so says Sara Hendren, author of a sharp new book called *What Can a Body Do?* The Olin College professor insists on making us see disability in a more human light and learning from our improved sight. She writes, for instance, that “disability is not a fixed or permanent label that belongs only to some people; it arrives for each of us,” adding that while misfit situations—“a disharmony that runs both ways, body to world and back”—are inevitable, they should ideally be met with resilience and creativity. (Her book teems with story after story of such meetings.) In this *Resonance Test* conversation with producer Ken Gordon, Hendren expands on her book and explains, among other things, how misfit scenarios don’t have to be isolating but can, in fact, build community. She talks about aging—“In our own country old age is a really an under-imagined moment of life. We tend to make it super passive, and we tend to patronize older adults in a way that's pretty shameful”—and about the idea of incessant adaptation: “Adaptation is the fundamental state.” Above all, Hendren’s words enjoined us to pay attention—to our bodies, the bodies of others, and the environment in which they move about. The point of doing so: Striving to give everyone access to a more pleasurable life and even a richer language. “My hope is that by paying attention, we get better language, meaning, non-jargony, non-expert, non-technical language but just language that is ready to hand for the things in our lives.”

Host: Kyle Wing

Engineer: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

The cloud is an opaque space. Few people know how to migrate safely upwards. Fortunately, in the first of our #CybersecurityByDesign episodes of *Silo Busting,* we talk with an expert who skillfully navigates the cloud: Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP. Rehman breaks through the nimbus surrounding the topic and explains to producer Ken Gordon the special nature of cloud security, the importance of data strategy, the smart way to fly through multiple clouds, the cloud’s agile dynamism and elasticity, and the cloud-based fear many people feel (and how to disarm it). Truth is, the cloud is complicated and organizations need to cultivate a more realistic understanding here. Says Rehman: “A lot of people move to the cloud not thinking about ‘What exactly is the boundary? What exactly is the protection?’” Pay attention, and you’ll be soon floating such essential questions yourself.

Host: Alison Kotin

Engineer: Kip Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

Clayton Rose got the upper hand on COVID-19. Rose is the President of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and he has overseen the successful reopening of his school for the Fall 2020 semester. By reducing the on-campus student population; implementing strict testing, social distancing, and masking policies; and producing a stream of clear and continuous health reporting, the school’s COVID cases dropped from three to, as of the airing of this episode, zero. (Yes, *zero.*) Rose humbly says: “The congratulations really belong to our students and faculty and staff here” who complied.

Rose acknowledges that redesigning the fall student experience required being iterative, knowing that “there are going to be things that we're going to try that aren't going to work exactly right, or sometimes are not going to work at all. And you have to be open minded to adjusting or changing or just putting aside” whatever fails to make the grade.

In this back-to-school episode of *The Resonance Test,* producer Ken Gordon, who recently sent his own daughter to Bowdoin, throws a series of questions at the president. They talk about the importance of having first-year students on campus (and how non-first-years feel about this), reconfiguring collegiate space in the pandemic era, the intricacies of designing an effective COVID dashboard, and why his community needs to stay vigilant if they’re to keep the virus off campus.

Host: Kyle Wing

Editor: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

Over the last 40 years, says Jit Agarwal, our VP of Enterprise Products, supply chains have “become very strung out, very long, very complicated, very convoluted, and very, very diverse.” This has made them brittle, a fact that the pandemic has brutally exposed. Denis Grishin, our VP and Supply Chain Practice Leader and Agarwal’s interlocutor for this episode, adds that for the longest time, “the name of the game was productivity”—but supply chains’ efficiency “did us a disservice.” Plug in your earbuds to hear their ideas about creating more resilient supply chains today (Grishin says, for instance, that you should “try to cut out the complexity that’s not really contributive or additive to your business”). The pair toss up some agile answers to the questions of the inquiring Ken Gordon, on topics such as demand partnerships, streamlining, future-proofing teams, and forecasting (“Forecasting is ultimately an inexact science. The forecast is always wrong,” says Grishin. “The reality always is something else”). Tune in, and you’ll learn not just about where supply chains are headed—you’ll also discover Agarwal’s secret nickname! Well, sort of.

Host: Alison Kotin

Engineer: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

We need to talk about electronic medical records. Dr. Danielle Ofri certainly does. Why? The physician-author of the newly published volume, *When We Do Harm,* tells our Jonathon Swersey, on the latest episode of this podcast: “I was just tearing my hair out” because a patient requested a biopsy report and she spent nearly 45 minutes trying to extract it from the EMR. When Ofri says “now it falls on the clinicians to somehow find time to customize the EMR to make it workable,” you get a vivid sense of how EMRs contribute to physician burnout.

Ofri, it turns out, has all kinds of strong opinions. Listen to this episode and you’ll learn, for instance, how *shame* functions in the world of medical error. (After making an error as a second-year resident, she says: “It took me 20 years till I could talk about and write about it.”) Ofri also discusses the naming of medicines, the common good and American healthcare, and what it’s like to practice medicine during the current pandemic and prepare for the next one.

Attend to Ofri, *Resonance Test* listeners. When she speaks, she does good.

Host: Kyle Wing

Editor: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

In our remote present, people—a group that includes *you*—have been left to their own devices. This means we must all develop a capacity for learning. Fast. Today’s guests have a deep understanding of why we should reskill ourselves in the next normal. Sandra Loughlin, our Head of Learning Practice, and Jit Agarwal, VP of Enterprise Products, give *Silo Busting* Producer, Ken Gordon, 762.5 earfuls of what it means for contemporary workers to experience and harness facilitative anxiety. The pair talk about many relevant topics, including the shift in mindset needed for this moment. Loughlin says the explosion of remote work has led to the rise of “a different mindset of management. Instead of thinking about seat time or being visible, their focus is shifting to outcomes.” In this environment, she says, employees must think about agility and resilience. Agarwal adds that they should think about their particular jobs, companies, and industries and figure out how can stay ahead of the curve by developing a “bleeding-edge skillset.” They also talk about mentoring in the age of “figure it out” or FIO and discuss common online training tools and the importance of feedback. This learning is as easy as listening, so unclog your ears and get smart.

Host: Alison Kotin

Engineer: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

Want to get schooled on innovation and higher education? Talk with Andy Boynton. Boynton is the John and Linda Powers Family Dean at the Boston College Carroll School of Management. He’s also a long-term friend of ours (we helped [BC redesign their core curriculum). As we’ve been lately thinking about the higher-ed experience, we decided to invite him onto *The Resonance Test.* In this informal-and-informed conversation, our Toby Bottorf, who knows a thing or two about college administrators, chatted with Boynton about the fundamental nature of design thinking, in and out of the classroom. Boynton talked about ideas and competitive advantage and the importance of the “connective tissue” of innovation. He spoke of time (“Spending time up front makes it faster in the long run. And by the way, it’s gonna bring success faster”) and cost (“Throwing a lot of products and services out and seeing which ones stick sounds very expensive to me”). As for BC’s own innovations, he says things have been “incredibly collaborative all summer across the university” and that they’ve prepared for this by, um, working with us. “You don’t flip a switch and say, ‘OK, let’s innovate together, let’s collaborate. You gotta have the right culture in place.”

Host: Kyle Wing

Editor: Kip Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon