The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network

What does it mean to be at the vanguard of leadership training? To find out, listen to Vanguard’s Michael Gunn. He’s the investment management company’s Global IT Audit Department Head—and the guy responsible for the firm’s unique leadership training program.

In the latest episode of *The Resonance Test,* Sandra Loughlin, Managing Principal and Head of Client Learning & Talent Enablement at EPAM, grills Gunn all about Vanguard’s A+ Leadership Program for IT. “It's something that I haven't seen before,” she says, noting its “comprehensive, 360, whole-organization approach.”

Gunn tells the pedagogic tale of how he gleaned, from listening closely to colleagues, that they prefer experiential learning and then set up a program that blocked of sections of time to provide such content *and* focused, small-group follow-up discussions (“Where leaders *really* like to dive deeper into the conversation and share more insights is in these six, seven, eight person IT leadership cadres,” says Gunn). This enabled leaders to connect with each other, reflect on what they’d learned, and ask: “How are you actually infusing learning into your day-to-day responsibility, both personally as well as with your team?”

The networked approach allows Vanguard’s leader-learners to focus on implementation, which is something that Loughlin and this podcast heartily endorse. It is a living, evolving process; as Gunn says: “It's not just one event. It's not just one conversation. It's this iteration on a topic.” Listen closely and Gunn will teach you that when it comes to learning, it’s smart to think like a product owner and work to understand product-market fit.

So if your organization could stand to improve its learning process, feel free to eavesdrop on the Gunn-Loughlin back-and-forth. You might just pick up an A+ insight or two.

Host: Toby Bottorf

Engineer: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

It’s playtime on *The Resonance Test.*

Let’s welcome Ricardo Álvarez, MIT researcher and co-author, with Fábio Duarte, of *Urban Play: Make-Believe, Technology, and Space,* into the magic circle of our podcast. We’re going to talk about how playing with new technologies is what enables real transformations to happen.

Ken Gordon, our producer, goes hyper-ludic for this conversation and jumps with Álvarez on the big podcasting trampoline. They get into the interactive narrative of Disneyland (“This is storytelling in physical form,” says Álvarez), the co-designing of video games (“You effectively give players the tools not just to play the game, but ultimately to hack the game and express themselves through gameplay”), and the extremely flexible nature of the metaverse: “Because it's virtual it comes with the advantages of virtuality, which means not only can it be infinite, but it can be whatever you want. It doesn't need to subscribe to the laws of physics, the laws of nature.”

At one point, Gordon actually pretends to be an annoyed client, an inveterate optimizer, who doubts the value of all this playfulness.

“When you push for optimization, you're pushing towards specialization of these technologies, which means that your evolutionary path for that technology becomes constrained,” replies Álvarez, cool as a whole salad of cucumbers.

Álvarez brings up the idea that playfulness “is the attitude that helps us differentiate between ethical self-deception and sheer manipulation” and the challenges of going beyond prototypes in Fab Labs (“How do you move output for a Fab Lab to scale?”).

He also chews on the fact that we’re at an inflection point in VR history: “We're sitting at a moment in time when we are fundamentally designing the language of the new medium” and the responsibilities this creates for those at the table.

Well, what are you waiting for? Join the fun. Leap in. Hit Play.

Host: Kenji Ross

Engineer: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

It’s easy enough to talk about ESG in the board room, at a town hall, even on a podcast. The tough part is making it real, *comme on dit.*

Which brings us to today’s guest, Xavier Houot, Senior Vice President of Sustainable Business and Operations at Schneider Electric—an organization that was recently named the world’s most sustainable corporation.

In a spirited dialogue with Elaina Shekhter, EPAM’s Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer, Houot explains Schneider Electric’s comprehensive and holistic approach to ESG.

“We start with looking at the challenges outside of ourselves,” says Houot, adding that Schneider Electric views itself “from an outside-in perspective.” They consider the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. They compare themselves with the best performers in each category of ESG—the best on safety, the best on circularity—and of course they consider their performance in relation to their performance of the previous six months.

“It's not very important to please ourselves saying we are better than we were [six months before]…. If we are better but it's not enough, that frankly doesn't make the world a better place.”

Houot and Shekhter’s conversation swerves in a variety of interesting directions: Straight into Schneider Electric’s Zero Carbon Project, over toward building the business case for sustainability, and high up into the issue of organizational leadership, with informative excursions into the challenges of measurement, the role of partnerships, and the meaning of COP26.

Most importantly, they take a *realistic* approach to ESG. Shekhter, for instance, insists on keeping it real when she asks: “How do you know that decarbonization is the right focus?” and Houot responds with full and informed candor. To hear the answer, and many other important points about ESG, click the link below.

Host: Alison Kotin

Engineer: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

To make the most of data, you need to understand that it requires more than an obvious linear process, with discrete handoffs and dashboards and such. It’s about properly viewing data in its living ecosystem, about seeing data as a *loop. *

The data loop, in fact, is the central focus of our most recent episode of *The Resonance Test.* John Reardon, VP & Senior Director of Global Risk Solutions Technology at Liberty Mutual Insurance, mixes it up with Val Tsitlik, EPAM’s Head of Big Data Practice and VP of Technology Solutions. Also looped in: Dmitry Grinberg, Managing Principal of Technology Solutions at EPAM, who lobs some great questions at these two data-driven men.

Reardon says that Liberty Mutual uses the data loop as a framework that “helps us shape our priorities and technical approaches, ensuring that we can realize incremental value and make it real along the way.” He then walks us through the key elements of the loop: unlocking data, making it accessible, providing “good, modern, self-service tooling whenever wherever possible,” and finally operationalizing all the insights the process produces.

One of the great advantages, Tsitlik notes, of the data loop is that it focuses the business conversation: Once an organization starts talking about data loops, they stop talking about *data projects.* It’s a mindset that looks at the situation “holistically… as a continuous process,” one that involves “ingesting more data” and “providing more access to various customer users.”

When they discuss how Liberty Mutual operationalized machine learning, Reardon says: “The more that we can build our models and our capabilities with a simple API approach, the more we can easily integrate those insights into different parts of our environment.”

Reardon emphasizes building simple models and deploying and iterating quickly. Everyone agrees that culture change is important and can be challenging.

He says: “You can easily understate or even miss, you know, the cultural aspect that's required to head down this path, and we spent a lot of time in our business group educating our leaders first.”

But right now it’s time for *your* education. Enjoy the conversation.

Host: Kenji Ross

Engineer: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

Let’s talk experience! In business today, we speak endlessly about digital experience, customer experience, employee experience, patient experience, provider experience, and so on. But one of the newest forms of experience to walk on the scene is still somewhat obscure: developer experience. With an increased focus on digital business, it’s really important for organizations to think about the professional and personal well-being of the people developing software for them.

The latest episode of Silo Busting double-clicks on this highly relevant topic. Listen up, and you’ll get the full download from Pavel Azaletskiy, EPAM’s Director of Technology Consulting and Head of Engineering Excellence Consulting in North America. He’s in conversation with Sandra Loughlin, Managing Principal and Head of Client Learning & Talent Enablement at EPAM.

Loughlin says: “Developer experience is about keeping developers happy and successful in their jobs” and that it involves various components: tools, culture, belief in job, and organizational vision.

Azaletskiy concurs and notes that developer experience isn’t just for companies exclusively focused on tech. “Every company right now is a technology company,” he adds. “Without efficient delivery and good developer experience it’s very hard to compete.”

This plugged-in conversation examines he cultural aspects of DevX, the interesting idea of citizen development, the essential elements that developers seek in a job, the relevant benchmarks companies should consider, and more. Experience it for yourself!

Host: Alison Kotin

Engineer: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

The healthcare industry discovered something critical during the pandemic—when clinical sites are shut down, it *is* possible to go remote. Successfully. This is one of the many important things Matt O’Donnell, an Industry Executive, Health and Life Sciences at Microsoft, tells our Jonathon Swersey on the latest episode of *The Resonance Test.*

O’Donnell says that COVID “brought clinical trials into mainstream American and made it a common topic that people were discussing.” He explains how in recentralized clinical trials medications are directly shipped to customers instead of a site, “so that impacts the supply chain aspects of it.” Vaccines were temperature-controlled, “So you’re making sure that the vaccine is delivered within the appropriate ranges. And [considering] things like IoT, where Microsoft was involved, to verify that a vaccine was delivered end-to-end, and it would still be within the range that’s required.”

There is, O’Donnell says, a silver lining in the shift to decentralized clinical trials: Now that we’re “allowing people to participate more remotely, [it] really opens up the world—to where more diverse participants can be a part of the trial itself.”

He and Swersey talk about diversity and DCT, the role business objectives play, how artificial intelligence can help comb through research and match up patients and trials, and how the 21ST Century Cures Act factors in here.

Listen to the episode on and you’ll conclude that the future clinical trials promise to be, for patients, physicians, and pharma, considerably less of a trial.

Host: Kenji Ross

Engineer: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

People don’t normally visit our Boston studio with a rack of superhero outfits. But this is exactly what happened on a recent Thursday afternoon: Sergei Nossoff, CEO of Teslasuit, and Andrei Pyko, who runs the company’s research team, dropped by to demo their sleek black haptic feedback garments. After permitting a few lucky people to suit up, get calibrated, and venture into VR land, they conducted a spirited conversation with Elaina Shekhter, EPAM’s Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer.

The trio talked about how the suit was originally conceived of as a video game accessory (Nossoff said that his CTO originally sought to “create a suit that would provide extra sensations during gaming”) but it’s currently used for (1) XR training and motion capture; and (2) medical and healthcare applications.

The task of the technology, said Pyko, is to get people deeply involved and forget that they’re zipped into a suit or a VR environment. “There are a lot of emotions just wearing the suit,” he said and added that donning the suit can prompt people to ask, “Am I a superhero?”

Zooming out, Shekhter noted that EPAM’s investment in Teslasuit, like our other recent investments, focuses on "identifying unique, technologically driven propositions that present an opportunity for EPAM to accelerate the company either through our own product development expertise or to act as a channel or as an integrator for a large number of our portfolio customers across multiple verticals.”

The portfolio of this conversation included such topics as Teslasuit’s current business model (B2G and B2B enterprise training services), their partnership with the Hospital for Special Surgery (Nossoff said the aim of the HSS partnership is to “create a product to allow patients to be treated remotely as well as be diagnosed remotely”), and how PII data and privacy factors in here (“So far, we do not have medical certification but we are working towards it,” said Pyko).

Where might Teslasuit be walking in the near future?

“In the longer term, we can really use this technology for the consumer market,” said Nossoff. He’s not necessarily thinking about video games, but fitness and wellbeing and yoga.

Shekhter joked about Teslasuit working with Louis Vuitton on yoga clothing, and Nossoff talked about pajamas for older people to take biometric parameters to prevent heart attacks during sleep and industrial PPE use.

All agreed that deep tech smart wearables have a future. And it might be a luxurious future at that.

“I wasn’t actually kidding about Louis Vuitton yoga wear,” said Shekhter. “We work with a lot of retailers who’d absolutely love to brand your black superhero suits.”

Host: Kenji Ross

Engineer: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

*Data and dairy.* You might not link these two words together—unless you’re Sidhant Jena, Co-Founder and Director of FaunaTech. In this conversation with our Duncan Freake, Jena explains his mission to bring “precision farming” to small farmers all over India (“probably the largest dairy producer in the world”) and, perhaps eventually, the globe. Jena is obsessed with solving the last-mile problems of dairy farmers, and he’s using the smartphone as a diagnostic tool to measure the quality of milk and health of the cows that deliver it. Freake says: “Last-mile measurement enables last-mile interventions,” and Jena compares what he’s doing to our recent experiences with COVID testing: “You need to do testing, and testing leads to tracing, and tracing leads to isolation.” Listen and learn about dairy data aggregation and sharing, the nuances of milk pricing, collaborating with government regulators, EHRs for farms, the quantified cow, and more. Intrigued? Pull up a stool and hit the play button.

Host: Kenji Ross

Engineer: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

This episode of *Silo Busting* will school you on the topic of testing. In attendance are (1) Phillip Soffer, EPAM’s VP of Product-Service Systems; and (2) and Jonathan Lupo, our VP of Experience Design. Together they will ensure that the themes of testing, automation, and experience design are present and accounted for.

Testing is critical in this day and age. “AIs are biased in favor of the datasets they are trained on,” says Soffer. “Which may not be the same people for whom the systems are intended, or it may introduce really dangerous algorithmic bias that needs to be checked somehow.”

But the dangers are many in this world, and one of them involves time. In the old days, we had time for all kinds of individual tests: unit tests, integration tests, functional tests, user experience tests, accessibility tests. No more. “The time that there is for all these kinds of different tests is becoming increasingly compressed,” says Soffer.

Says Lupo: “Clients are not giving us more time; they’re giving us less to perform due diligence when we develop products and services.” One benefit of automated testing and analytic, he adds, is that “we don’t have to create these moments in a product lifecycle for testing, validation.” These, says Lupo, “can be happening continuously, in real time.”

Speaking of real time: Lupo asks Soffer if our current pandemic moment has an opportunity for automated remote testing?

Soffer says we used to have “hallway testing”—in which you could walk around use use officemates as testers. Once, this was a substitute for formal testing, but the pandemic shut it down. “What happens when you take away the hallway because everybody’s in a different place?” he asks and then answers: “We’ve had a lot more interest in doing that kind of hallway testing in a virtual way, through the testing crowd that we have as part of Test IO.”

So listen to what these experts have to say. What you’ll hear is not—*not*—a test.

Host: Alison Kotin

Engineer: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

The cyberthreats are out there. They’re real. And they’re not going away. This is why having a strong Managed Detection and Response program is absolutely necessary for the modern organization. MDRS matters. And in the latest #CybersecurityByDesign conversation, Shariq Hassan, EPAM’s Senior Manager Technology and Security Consulting, and Anton Romm, our Service Delivery Manager, explain to Producer Ken Gordon, why. It’s a complicated moment, and we need to take great care with everyone who wishes to connect with our organizations. As Hassan says: “Every user that logs into a network is a privileged user and should be considered a privileged user.” Listen to these experts to understand what Romm describes as “proactive threat-hunting activities.”

Host: Alison Kotin

Engineer: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon