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Author: Charlene O’Hanlon

  • Tech. Strong. Women. EP 3

    Tech. Strong. Women. EP 3

    In this episode of Tech. Strong. Women., guest Nicole Dove, head of security at Riot Games, discusses with hosts Charlene O’Hanlon and Tracy Bannon her non-traditional path into IT and ways in which females can unconsciously sabotage themselves, as well as the impact of a strong mentor, regardless of gender. The video is below followed by a transcript of the conversation.

    Charlene O’Hanlon: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Techstrong TV, and welcome to another episode of Techstrong Women, the ongoing series that elevates the conversation about gender equity and parity by celebrating the successes of females in IT, and so much more, we have so many great conversations. I’m Charlene O’Hanlon, as you probably know, but my cohost is Tracy Bannon with Mitre. Tracy, thank you so much for joining me, as always.

    Tracy Bannon: Oh, I always get so excited. Thank you very much for allowing me to cohost with you.

    Charlene O’Hanlon: Oh, listen, you – we are equals, we are equals, we’re not, you know, superior or inferior. And with us today we have Nicole Dove, who is an amazing, amazing female in IT, cybersecurity, and just a rockstar in the industry. Nicole, thank you so much for joining us today. We’re really thrilled to have you on the show.

    Nicole Dove: Thanks for having me. I love any thing, effort, or people who celebrate women in tech, so this is, like, the party to be at. Thanks for having me.

    Charlene O’Hanlon: Excellent, all right, well, hopefully, we’ll do right by you today, but do wanna thank you again for being here. We’ve got a lot to unpack in today’s show, but really what I wanna do is start out by, you know, telling us a little bit about what you’re doing today, and maybe how you got to be where you are.

    Nicole Dove: Yeah, so I’ve got, like, 50 jobs, and it’s easy [laughter] because I love them all. So, by day, I’m head of security at Riot Games, which is super exciting. It’s a new role for me, so I’m really, really happy to be there, fantastic team, fantastic products and services. I’m also a visiting lecturer at a local university, Clark Atlanta University. And I also extend my teaching into being a LinkedIn Learning instructor, where I create cybersecurity courses. And then I sit on a couple boards for two tech startups. One is called Wraith Audio and the other is called CyberSaint. So, a lot of tech, a lot of learning, a lot of teaching, a lot of people in my world, but I love all of it and I wouldn’t change it for anything.

    Tracy Bannon: So how did you find your way, though, to this most recent, right, the head of security?

    Nicole Dove: Yeah.

    Tracy Bannon: You’re one of the few females that I’ve met, so far, who are truly head of security. I’ve got lots of women who are on the rise, and in the security area in particular, it is booming, and that’s awesome, it’s completely amazing. How did you find your way into hat role?

    Nicole Dove: I slipped and fell into tech, and [laughs] this role was something that I don’t know that I expected, but I think that I found myself looking for an opportunity to have impact, right? So, you know, my career started – I went to school for accounting and finance. I started my career on Wall Street; it was all I wanted to do. And when I got there, I quickly realized, like, “Yeah, this may not be it,” right? So, like, I’ve got, you know, I don’t know if it translates, but I’ve got purple hair, you know – 

    Tracy Bannon: Oh, it does, I see it. [Laughs]

    Nicole Dove: Yeah, right? So, you know, back in the day, you know, 20 years ago, it wasn’t as accepted as it is now for, you know, a young woman of color who looks different, ’cause I’m, you know, different than the typical Wall Streeter, maybe to be accepted or to rise through the ranks. But I learned a lot, I learned so much, got into consulting, I just, I loved solving people’s problems, right? I loved the, you know, working on different engagements with different teams and different clients, and I really, really love to travel. But again, much of the big four consulting culture did mimic Wall Street, so I said, “You know, I’ve gotta figure out how to actually make the change,” because I began to see how culture impacts business. So I went all the way to a videogame company. I worked at Take-Two that owns Rockstar – had a blast, stayed there about five years, did some videogame voiceover work, got my first promotion, I was, like, “I’ve found my people.”

    And then I wanted to do something a little different, so I got into audit at a payroll company, and that’s where I started to just, like, explore all types of things. I was on a team, we built, staffed, and managed international work centers in Philippines, Romania, India, Brazil. I got to live in Romania for a little while; that was fascinating. But then I started to see how every single thing I did, whether it be Wall Street and treasury or videogames or payroll or even international operations, tech was the common thread, right? Like, we essentially took 20 percent of the company’s headcount and staffed it overseas, and they were able to be seamless and flawless because of technology. I’m, like, “There is something with this thing.” So, I really just took, you know, my expertise from risk and my willingness to learn tech, and that’s how I got into cyber.

    And what I love about this role is, you know, as a company that’s growing so rapidly, you see what’s happening in the industry, ransomware attacks, new technology, I mean, everything is just exponentially changing. What I like is that I get to bring that business background to cyber, to tech, and help people understand that tech is not – it doesn’t slow you down. If you position it correctly, it can actually enable innovation and speed and agility and creativity. And that’s what I love most. I would’ve never ever thought I would work in tech, like, I can barely hook up a printer, but I know risk [laughs], right? And I know people. And a lot of tech is people and risk and really just getting the best product and service to the customer, and that’s essentially what brought me right here today.

    Charlene O’Hanlon: What I love about that story is the fact that you did not swim in your own lane, you were going back and forth. So many people, I think, just kind of create a vision for themselves and they go for it. you know, it’s, “This is my goal in life is, you know, is to be a cybersecurity professional.” Great, you know, it’s – but you’ve had a lot of so many varied experiences that you’ve been able to kind of parlay into what you’re doing now. And I wonder, how did you create the narrative behind that? Because, you know, when you’re thinking about, you know, say, a job title or a job description, and you’re maybe going for a particular job or something like that, so many women, and we’ve had this discussion before, if they don’t check all the boxes, they’ll never apply for a particular job.

    And so, you know, so many times, you look at a job description and you’re, like, “I’m just not sure, you know, that what my skills are will resonate or will translate very well, without me actually having to explain how things go and how they do actually work.” So, how have you created the narrative around your experience into what you’re doing today and how it all fits together?

    Nicole Dove: Yeah, so, creating and changing narratives is the story, right? And I think the important part was not allowing these unicorn job descriptions to intimidate me, right? I think the second motivation was seeing men in positions that they didn’t qualify for, I’m, like, “Well, you know what, if they can do it, why not?” Right? And so, but as a woman, you know, like, we think a lot, we’re very tactical, right, we think things through. I tried to not think so much about what I couldn’t do and thought about what I could do, right? So I’ll look at a job description, everything I have, I’ll cross that out, I’ve got that in the bag. Then I look at the things that I don’t have and think through, “How can I get these things?” or, “What in my experience may not be exactly this but lends another perspective on this that I can bring?”

    And then the last part is, I’m a nontraditional technologist, so there is gonna be a host of things that I bring that nobody else is gonna bring, right? And that’s gonna be, like, the magic potion. So, you know, I often challenge – you know, one of my mentors said, “I don’t even read the job description.” [Laughs] Right? But it takes away that intimidation factor. Because there’s so much of the job that’s not on the paper. That’s always something I ask in interviews, “What do I need to know about this job that I cannot read on this paper?” And those are the things that, you know, we need to be prepared for, because it’s not so much what you expect to happen; the challenges are always the unexpected. And so, just by digging in that toolbelt and keeping an inventory for my own self, it helps you have something to pull from when you’re changing that story, or wanting to change your story and wanting to know what you can leverage to unlock that next level.

    Tracy Bannon: You bring up a really good point, a side conversation, which is: what has happened with job descriptions? They’ve become magic unicorn listings, and quite frankly, anybody that I interview, anybody, any that I look at, there’s never anybody who can check all of the boxes.

    Nicole Dove: Yes. [Laughs]

    Tracy Bannon: And it was an important message 20 years ago, but it’s an even more important message now. And there’s a reverse to that, which is, the folks who are putting those things out need to not focus on finding unicorns. You might run across one by accident, or the four-leaf clover in that one yard that you walk by, but in general, what are those applicable skills? What are the crossovers? And what you had was a lot of crossover skills and a uniqueness that other people didn’t bring to the table. That’s thought diversity, right? Educational diversity, background diversity, right? That’s what has helped to jettison you forward. That’s fantastic advice.

    Nicole Dove: Yeah, thank you.

    Tracy Bannon: So, you know, I’d be interested, when you are going through and working and mentoring with other people, and helping them to figure out what they want to do with their career, are there times where they’ll bring a job description and you’ll help them to walk through, like, “Don’t look at this,” or interpret it in that way? Do you help them apply the same skills that you’ve done for yourself?

    Nicole Dove: Absolutely. So, this is an exercise that I’ve used – so this exercise actually was a big part of me coming into tech, right? I was very intimidated by the job descriptions in technology, and it was only because of amazing mentors who were just, like, “No, you can do this. [Laughs] Go in the room and sell what you have, right? You can do this.” And so, it’s – you know, things are so much bigger when we don’t put them down on paper, right? And so, and I realized that a lot of other professionals feel that same intimidation, whether it’s within their own field or going into a new field, especially going into a new field, even more going into tech, right? Because it just seems so huge and big and so much relies on it, right?

    And so, because that exercise was so successful for me, it’s something I walk people through when they have something that they wanna do, when they have a big role they wanna apply for. Like, it’s a great way to pressure-test it, right? Because now you walk in pretty much knowing what they want and what they expect, and now you have the opportunity to align yourself with that, and be honest about what you don’t have, right, but what your thought process is to how you will get it. ‘Cause nobody knows everything, right?

    Tracy Bannon: I’m gonna guess there are times where, whether it’s you or whether it’s somebody that you mentor, goes into this conversation and the Charlene O’Hanlons walk away going, “Oh, my gosh, that’s a great idea. I hadn’t thought about that,” right? [Laughter] 

    Nicole Dove: I hope so.

    Tracy Bannon: So, whether they hire you or not, they’ve learned and gained kind of in this, you know, odd reverse-mentoring that happens, when you’re bringing those new ideas to the table.

    Nicole Dove: Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. And I’ve had some interviews that I’ve done horribly on, but those were learning experiences, too, right?

    Charlene O’Hanlon: Yeah. I feel like, you know, with these job descriptions in particular, I think companies do that on purpose, so that they can kind of gauge the type of people who do end up applying for those jobs. Because those are the ones who are the mavericks, if you will, those are the ones who really feel as though they can bring as much as possible to the table. And they know that they’re not, you know, they don’t have 45 years of whatever, you know, but they think that they’re qualified for the job, and that alone should get them in the door. But, you know, but at the end of the day, it’s kind of this push and pull between being what people expect you to be and being your authentic self, your true self, what you know you’re capable of doing and who you know you are at your heart. And that sometimes can be a difficult thing to reconcile, being your true authentic self, when you know you don’t tick all the boxes. And so, has that ever been a challenge for you to kind of get beyond, you know, just knowing that maybe who you are is not really everything that this person wants you to be on paper, but you know that you bring so much more to the conversation?

    Nicole Dove: You know, so, let’s unpack the term “who they want you to be,” right? Because what they really want is somebody who can get the job done, right? We get in our heads, like, and I am so guilty, and honestly, Charlene, I’m guilty of this with every single job that I take, even till this day. I don’t know why this is a lesson I have to keep learning, but it’s, like, as soon as I step outside the box and I do something bigger, you know, I’m, like, “Oh, crap, they really think I can do this.” [Laughter] [Crosstalk], like, “Oh, okay, I gotta deliver, now.” And you get so caught up in that ticking and tying and going back to that profile that sometimes you don’t see the forest for the trees.

    Because when you really take a look, it’s, like, it’s not about knowing those things; it’s about being – it’s not even about knowing everything. It’s about being relentless about finding the solution, being resourceful about looking for the answer, right? If there’s something that you don’t know, instead of just going to ask someone, figure out a couple options. Do you know how much I google, like, all the time, right? And I felt so bad about that, at first, but now that I’ve been in cyber for a while, I realize there are so many domains, like, I know a little bit about everything, right? But sometimes I need that deep expertise.

    I’m not expected to be an expert across the board. So, I think it’s more about taking a step back and understanding what’s needed to thrive and be successful in the role, and making sure that I’m checking those boxes as opposed to, like, a set of technical aptitudes and expertises. ‘Cause I’m not gonna have that. I study all the time now, and it’s never gonna happen, but it takes some time. And as much as I’m saying this, I’m probably gonna be going through this tomorrow [laughter] [crosstalk].

    Tracy Bannon: I think that it’s common, and I’m finding that at first I thought that it was more women. Sometimes we call it the Imposter Syndrome, and I used to think maybe it was more with females, but I’m actually realizing that it’s not. It’s everywhere, it’s everybody. However, to your point earlier, I do see a difference with a woman looking at the list and wanting to be a perfectionist and looking to checkmark everything on that list, where, sometimes a man goes, “Ah, I have three out of five. That’s good enough.”

    And I think what you’re saying is: don’t worry about everything that’s there. Be close, be energetic, bring your life to it, bring all of your life energy along with you, and see what happens with it. See what happens with it.

    Nicole Dove: Yes.

    Tracy Bannon: You know, along that line is, the number of changing job requirements or job descriptions where they no longer are including advanced degrees. I’m seeing a lot in technology, where it’s, like, “You know, we used to want a master’s degree in compute science, and somebody who is doing postdoctoral.” There would be wonderful educational academic credentials that they would want. IBM’s one of the first ones to say, “Let’s go nontraditional,” and they’re expanding their workforce in crazy amounts. Do you think that that’s helping with some of the other work that you’re doing? I really wanna hear a little bit about IANS and that kind of mentoring, because you’re helping, you know, people who are in all kinds of different roles. Now, you’re not necessarily mentoring kids, at that point; you’re out there mentoring the world.

    Nicole Dove: Yeah, so I love this question, because I think, and especially with me now having a foot in the education and the academia world, I’m seeing things shift, right? I love LinkedIn Learning because it saved me so many days, because there can be a project that I need to work on or lead, that I might not have in-depth experience in. And I can go and find a course on LinkedIn Learning, and within an hour, right, I’ve got a foundational understanding of what’s happening, from a verified expert or professional. And my certificates from Harvard, my double bachelor’s from Clark Atlanta didn’t create that, right? It was that one hour that I sat and learned.

    When I think about, like, different career experiences that I’ve had, on-the-job learning is something that I think hasn’t been prioritized as much in the past as maybe it is now, right? And I think that’s what’s beginning to rise. I think education is going to shift. I think on-demand learning and on-the-job experience is going to become more acknowledged and respected than it has been traditionally. And I talk a lot about this, I’ve got a podcast called “Urban Girl Corporate World,” you’d be surprised at what – I had a CISO who went to school for women’s studies, right? The head of risk and security at TikTok, she went to school for finance, she was a former Wal Streeter, too, right? But as leaders, it gives us so many different lenses. And that’s what I really love about working with IANS as faculty.

    So, IANS is a service that organizations can subscribe to and they provide a ton of support in different ways, so they’ve got forums and conferences and online classes. But they have this service called “Ask an Expert,” and essentially, you can look across any cybersecurity domain, we’ve got about 85 to 100 faculty, typically CISO or CISO directs, and you can spend an hour on the phone with this professional expert and talk about anything. I have helped CISOs look at their strat plans, develop security awareness programs, help government agencies enhance their third-party risk management programs, right? They’re not – this is – and this is different from, again, they could go on with their learning and get that foundational aspect, but they want the experience, right?

    And I think to your point, Tracy, that’s what mentorship is about: getting the firsthand perspective from somebody with experience. Because theory is great, but execution is so much better, and what I’m able to share is, “Hey, I’ve done that before,” or, “Oh, you’re thinking about doing this? Well, I did that and it flopped, and here’s why, here’s what you need to be mindful of.” And that’s what’s, I find, really, really special about that offering with IANS.

    Tracy Bannon: I think you’re gonna see, you know, to the point you just made, the education system is changing, higher education. One of my besties is a tenured professor and we talk about this all the time, and how it changed with the GI Bill, how it’s changing now. But we are always going to need specialized STEM, we’re always going to need those researchers, we’re always going to need the theorist. So the theorist won’t go away, but we also don’t need everybody to be a theorist. So how do we move towards the type of education that you’re talking about, which is relevant to where we are now, based on experience but relevant to what’s happening right now, with those theorists helping us to get smarter and stronger as we go. I think we’re gonna see a big change in the number of students that are, you know, looking for at four-year degrees for different reasons.

    Nicole Dove: I agree.

    Charlene O’Hanlon: Yeah, I remember even before, you know, the pandemic, there was a big push to get people doing trades, going back into the trades, because we just, we didn’t have – everybody was in college, so nobody could actually unplug a toilet, basically. So, you know, now with the pandemic, we have all these people who have gone on and done a lot of online learning, gotten certifications, and recognizing that, “I hope I just didn’t waste three years of college money, you know, learning something that, quite literally, the last six months or the last nine months, going online and really hyper-focusing what I’m looking at, what I’m learning about, is helping me in my career more than my four-year degree ever did.” So, I agree with you 100 percent, that the education system as we know it is changing, the traditional four-year degree probably is gonna be going away. And between you and me, I hope it happens within the next six years, ’cause I’m sitting on a really bad 529 account that I would like to use that money to buy a summer home or something like that. [Laughter]

    Tracy Bannon: I don’t think it’s ever gonna go away, but I think we’re going to see it return to a more pure sense. We need – now, I’m an advocate of the liberal arts programs, where, you know, we teach people how to teach. I’m also a big advocate of nontraditional education. It can be on the job, it can be through, gosh, bootcamps that you take, it can be through LinkedIn Learning. We just have to help with corporate America, to think about the diversity of the education itself, and to be more accepting of it. That’s the pivot point that we’re at right now, as I’ve been in some interviews where people have, you know, where we’re interviewing and I’ve had to kind of mute out and say, “Guys, they don’t have that, but that’s okay. Are you not listening to the story?” Right? “Are you not listening to the story?” Now, Nicole, do you also –

    Nicole Dove: I agree with that.

    Tracy Bannon: Go ahead, I’m sorry.

    Nicole Dove: I’m sorry, go ahead, Tracy.

    Tracy Bannon: I was gonna ask you if you also, you know, you’re mentoring adults in a formal setting with IANS. Are you also still mentoring with some of the other outreach groups that you were working with before?

    Nicole Dove: Yeah, so, I typically, kind of the first priority for mentorship that I get now are my students, so that go through my lecture series, just because I’m finding, quite naturally, you know, you have, like, that top 20 percent of your students that really, really are excellent and really engage the content, and then really take it to practice. And a lot of them, ’cause my course is MBA level, a lot of them are, you know, really starting, you know, or management level or supervisory level in their careers. And, you know, bringing in that people aspect is a totally different ballgame than just being a tactical executor. I also speak a lot at conferences. My podcast has an online community of about 800 women all over the world, where we talk about, you know, different things about our experiences as women in the workplace.

    And then, you know, this industry is so small and we’re just circles of people intersecting. And so, there’s always, you know, different CISOs who are starting mentoring circles, or they may want you to meet someone and meet someone else. So a lot of it is just, is very organic. But I am very intentional about connecting with professionals on the rise, on, like, the next generation of professionals, because every single fantastic opportunity I have had, nine times out of ten it’s gonna be because of a mentor or somebody who sponsored me or spoke up for me. So I feel obligated to pay it forward. There’s no possible way.

    Charlene O’Hanlon: I agree, I think, you know, where we go in our lives, from a career perspective, has a lot to do with the influence that other people have on us. And as well as the influence that we have on other people. So, I would be loath to be able to count on one hand how many experiences or how many opportunities I got by answering an ad in the newspaper or online. The best ones have always been, “You know, I know somebody who’s looking for this person. I think you’d be perfect for the job.” So, and I think, again, that kind of goes back to that, that being your authentic self conversation, because, you know, these people know who you are, they know what you’re capable of doing, and they know what you can bring to an organization.

    And I think that can only be had by developing these relationships, whether it’s with the people you’re mentoring or who are mentoring you, or even just people who you’re working with on a day-to-day basis. I always think that it’s best to bring your authentic self to whatever you do, and that can pay off in spades.

    Nicole Dove: Agreed.

    Tracy Bannon: Now, Nicole, you do a lot of mentoring, but let me turn the question a little bit. Did you have mentors? So are there people that you’re, like, “If it hadn’t been for Joe or Sally or Mary or – “? [Laughter] Any stories you can share with us, there?

    Charlene O’Hanlon: I’m sensing a yes, there.

    Nicole Dove: Man, there are so many stories I can share. I’m gonna share [laughs] – so, I was at a tech conference, once, and, you know, even now, but even more so years ago, there are very few women, right, in attendance. And so, I am a complete introvert, and so, after I engage with people, lots and lots of people, I need to take a break and just kind of like replenish. So, if you’re at a tech conference, the best place to take a break, as a woman, is the women’s lounge, because nobody else is gonna be in there. So, I’m at the women’s lounge, I’ll never forget this, it was the Saint Regis in Atlanta, and I’m just hanging out being an introvert on my phone, and in walks a woman who was on the stage earlier. And I had really admired what she spoke about, and I had said to myself, “Oh, I’m gonna reach out, I’m gonna talk to her before the day is over.”

    But again, I’m in, like, relax introvert mode, “I’m in the women’s restroom, that’s so weird, I’m not gonna talk to her,” and I just kind of left it alone. And she came back and she was, like, “Oh, my god, you’re an introvert, too.” I’m, like, “Yes, my people.” And so, we just started talking and I mentioned some things that she had spoken about earlier, and she was just, like, “Oh, my goodness, we just have to stay connected.” And we have. She has been so instrumental to my growth in the industry, right? I ended up changing jobs sometime after. She helped me think through, you know, which options to take which aligned and why, right?

    “The industry is small, I know this leader, I know that person. Oh, you need to meet such-and-such,” right? Like, if I really trace it back, my opportunity at Riot kind of goes back to her and some folks that she connected me with sometime ago. And she’s – her name’s Olivia Rose; she’s a CISO at Amplitude. She is just phenomenal and fantastic, and I strive and hope to be half of what she was to me, to many others. Because literally, mentors have changed my life. Another one is Trina Ford, who’s the CISO at A&G. When I was first thinking about coming into tech, she was the chief business security officer at my then company, and I reached out to her and I was, like, “I’m not sure, but I’m really interested.” And she was, like, “I think you would be good. You should interview.”

    Right, just getting that nod of approval or getting that push can make so much of a difference. And these are women that I call on often for advice or perspective, and they’re just fabulous, and I only can imagine, you know, what challenges they had to overcome to get where they are, right? And so, I’m really grateful to have amazing women like that in my space and my circle.

    Charlene O’Hanlon: It sounds like they were all organic mentoring, you know, they weren’t set up, you know, just, like, you click with somebody or you don’t. And if you click with somebody, then, you know, those are the best relationships to have, because you know each other, You know where your strengths and weaknesses are.

    Nicole Dove: Yeah, a lot of people try to force it. [Laughs]

    Charlene O’Hanlon: Yeah, exactly, exactly, and that’s why I love the idea of mentoring programs, and I love them when they work, but I really do think that the best mentors are the ones who you actually kind of find on your own, whether intentionally or unintentionally.

    Nicole Dove: Yeah, I agree, I agree.

    Tracy Bannon: Now, have all of your mentors been women? And the reason I ask that is that, when I look back over my career, a lot of my career, I’ve been the only woman in the room. So, one of the most impactful mentors to me was a fellow by the name of Scott Bar, and he was the wind beneath my wings. He just said, “No, you are this. Go and do this,” and he would open doors, not literally open the doors, he would open the door of opportunity and say, “You need to charge through that,” and we would talk it through. And I know that I would not be where I am right now had he not, you know, looked at this person a couple years younger and said, “What are you doing over there being quiet? Get up here at the table.”

    Nicole Dove: Yeah, so they have not all been women. One of my favorite and most impactful mentors was a man, Steve. I was working at audit and I audited him, and I think he was just really impressed with my preparedness, my executive presence, and he told me, he said, “If you ever need anything, let me know.” And I was, like, “Okay, I’m gonna call you,” [laughter] and I called him, right? And he helped me navigate some of the, at that point, some of the biggest decisions that I had in my career. And what I loved about Steve is that, you know, first of all, legal is much like cyber audit, it’s a service to the business, right?

    So he has a perspective of how you have to position your offerings in order to get buy-in, how to effectively manage relationships and rapport. Which is something that I might not get from another business leader, because, right, they are income-driving. What I also liked about him, he would always, sometimes, like, I was so young and, like, so ambitious, and he would just say, “Nicole, get out of my office. Like, what are you doing? What are you talking about, right?” And I loved the candor, because sometimes you need to tell super young ambitious kids, like, “A lot of things are timing. Not now.”

    And I can’t imagine, had I taken some of these opportunities that were just crazy, it would’ve rerouted my path. But having someone to ground me and tell me when I’m absolutely nuts, but then motivate me and push me. And what I love most – and I say I love most ’cause I love so much about Steve – he never tried to make a decision for me. He helped me think through the consequences and downstream impact of my options, and that is a great mentor.

    Tracy Bannon: That absolutely is, don’t tell me what to do. I may ask you for a little bit more guidance than what you’re giving me right now, I may say, “Let’s roleplay a little bit,” but don’t tell me what to do, and teach me, help me figure it out. 

    Nicole Dove: Yes, yeah.

    Tracy Bannon: I love it, I love it.

    Charlene O’Hanlon: That is great. So, you’re actually keynoting at RSA, this year, right?

    Nicole Dove: Yes, I’m so excited. I am really, really excited.

    Charlene O’Hanlon: So tell us about that, how did that come about?

    Nicole Dove: So, RSA, I mean, that’s like the godfather of the tech conferences, and I remember when I first got in tech, one of my peers had presented at RSA and I was just, like, “Wow – ” It seemed so big, so far, so great, and I was, like, “I wanna do that, one day,” because I really, really love speaking, and I love speaking about tech, and I love speaking about being a woman in tech. So, when I saw the open call for RSA, I was, like, “You know what, I’m gonna throw my name in the hat,” and I did, and it worked. So, I’m really excited, I’m gonna be on the C-suite track, and I’m going to be talking about how your business information security officers are your cybersecurity secret weapon. It’s a new emerging role in the industry, right?

    Many companies are starting to build this into their teams, their leadership teams, but I don’t know that a lot of organizations know how to best leverage them. And so, I think by helping them understand how to unlock all of the benefits, so I think it can really help take organizations and their cybersecurity programs to another level.

    Charlene O’Hanlon: That is awesome. I wish you the best of luck with that. That’s gonna be a great discussion. And, you know, do you have other folks who are gonna be speaking there with you, or are you doing it all by yourself?

    Nicole Dove: So I’m doing a solo presentation by myself, yeah.

    Charlene O’Hanlon: That’s great.

    Nicole Dove: Yeah.

    Tracy Bannon: Well, hopefully we see you there. I am hoping to make it there. It’s hanging in the balance, right now, but it would be fun to connect, yeah.

    Nicole Dove: Yes, listen, we won’t be hard to find, I’ll have purple hair, you’ll have pink hair, right? [Laughter]

    Tracy Bannon: That’s right. Form our own –

    Charlene O’Hanlon: With the grey hair, so. [Laughter]

    Tracy Bannon: All colors and coalitions, we’ll be doing it. You know, as we’ve been talking about mentoring, I had mentioned this to Charlene, earlier, you know, I try to really tailor where I spend my time, not to be stingy with it, but it’s very easy to bleed out by just wanting to be too many things to too many people. I noticed a trend across yours, you’re not necessarily at the food pantry, but you are – you know, and I don’t mean that as a negative, I mean you’re figuring out how do you get the most bang for the buck? How do you take the things that you’re doing during the day – it looks like you’re using that as a way to kind of tailor where you’re mentoring and how you’re leaning in. Is that fair to say? I mean, give some guidance to those listening on, how do you figure out where to mentor, where to build community, where to invest your time with the extracurriculars, you know, that are tangential to career?

    Nicole Dove: Yeah, I think the first thing is being intentional, right, and being self-aware. It’s, like, and it starts with your own journey. Everything that I pour into people is motivated by what I wish I knew then, right? Like, I strive to be the person that I needed then, and I think that begins to lay the roadmap for the communities you engage in, the perspective that you hope to share, right? And so, I think another big thing, too, is you can’t be everything to everybody, so it’s about carving out time for that specifically. So, for me, I typically will take mentoring calls one day a week, and I’ll block off, you know, maybe three or four hours, right? But I also, and maybe it’s not necessarily mentoring, because when I say – well, maybe it is.

    Because I see mentoring as more of like a long-term relationship-building, right? But I think sometimes, and I think you have to be – there has to be a finite amount of that. Because if I’m gonna mentor 50 people, I’m gonna give them just a tiny bit. I think they deserve more. So, I’m more than willing to have a 30-minute conversation and talk to somebody, you know, go through things and chat through things and pressure test things and brainstorm, right? But there’s going to be a reduced few that I really am gonna connect with and carry through that process. I remember I had a mentor, once, and she said, “I do this for one a year.” And I was, like, you know what, I love that, because it’s like we’ve got stuff to accomplish, we set goals upfront, we check in, and we make sure that we’re on the right path.

    And if we’re not seeing results, we change courses. But again, I think it’s all about carving out time, being intentional, being selective, both the mentor and the mentee, understanding what it is that you have to offer and what that’s anchored in and rooted in, and just finding your people. And some of it is trial and error, right? You don’t get it right every time, but you’ve just gotta start somewhere and it will all kind of it.

    Tracy Bannon: But you’ve mentioned that there were some very intentional mentoring relationships where you have goals that are set, and so, it’s more formal.

    Nicole Dove: Mm-hmm.

    Tracy Bannon: But there’s also another side of it that you hit on, which is, there are accidental or unintentional or casual mentoring that happens. Both are really valuable. I do have women that reach out who want soundbite guidance, which eventually turns into a little bit more. But you’re right, you kind of have to limit that, because, you know, that opinions that are provided without getting to understand them and know the context of their lifeforce, right, what’s their spark, what’s their essence. I can give them some generalities that they might be able to google [laughter] or they might be able to find in a book. So, the formality, did you find that the formality, making sure that you set goals with a mentor, helped, as well?

    Nicole Dove: You know, I think even in the casual mentorships, there is still a little bit of formality in there. Because I’m not going to set up time with, you know, somebody that I admire, just to, like, you know, shoot the breeze, you know? Like, it just, it doesn’t make sense. But there are spaces for that, right? But if I’m gonna take an hour or 30 minutes or 45 minutes out of your day, I wanna make it worth my while, right? And so, I think there’s always – we always have things that we’re working towards, right? And some of those goals are big, some of those goals are small. All are relevant.

    But I think making sure that, when you get access to this person with this knowledge and perspective that you wanna pull from, you make the most of that time, ’cause time is the most valuable thing that we have. And, you know, some personalities lean towards they need that structure, right? Some people, for the time, they need that structure. On the other side, you know, some personalities like it a little bit more fluid, that’s what works, go for it. But I think within both, we’ve gotta be intentional in what we’re hoping to gain and what we’re hoping to give.

    Tracy Bannon: Thank you for that. I learn something every time we have a conversation, every time that we engage in one of these, with any of the guests that we’ve had. Charlene, I think we’re running a little bit low on time.

    Charlene O’Hanlon: Yes, we only have a couple of minutes left, so I wanna actually close with one question, and maybe we can just kind of think about it, if we can’t actually answer it here. But what is the one thing that you wish you had done differently in your career?

    Nicole Dove: Not second-guess myself. Just go for it. Worrying is a waste of time. It’s a waste of time. Either you win or you learn, right? So, you know, winners never quit and quitter never win, so just keep going. If I would’ve just kept – I would’ve probably saved everybody so much time, including myself.

    Charlene O’Hanlon: That is great advice. I actually recently read something, somebody said something to the effect of, “You can’t run the race before it starts.” You know, you can’t worry about things that you really don’t have any control over, so, I love that, I love that, you know, stop second-guessing; just live your life, you know, in the best way possible. So, I think it’s great. Nicole, thank you so much for your time, your expertise, just for being so awesome. We really do appreciate your being on Techstrong Women. It was a great conversation. I sure hope you’ll come back for it and join us again on a future episode.

    Nicole Dove: Absolutely. Thank you, ladies, Charlene, Tracy, you are amazing, and I love this platform and what you’re doing.

    Tracy Bannon: Thanks, guys.

    Charlene O’Hanlon: Thank you. All right, everybody, we’ve got lots more Techstrong TV coming up, so stay tuned.

  • Tips for Better Governance – Techstrong TV

    Tips for Better Governance – Techstrong TV

    David Williams, VP of Porduct Strategy at Quali, and Charlene discuss David’s top tips to better governance in DevOps. The video is below followed by a transcript of the conversation.

    Charlene O’Hanlon: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Techstrong TV. I’m Charlene O’Hanlon, and I’m here now with David Williams, who is the VP of product strategy over at Quali. David, thank you so much for joining me. Good to see you.

    David Williams: It’s good to see you, too, Charlene. It’s good to be here.

    O’Hanlon: Excellent, excellent. So, lots of stuff going on in the world of DevOps these days, but one of the things that we have been hearing a lot more noise about is governance in DevOps. And especially with just the insane amount of automation that’s going on to help kind of speed up the processes, obviously, it can be pretty easy for things to kinda go off the rails. So I wanna kinda get a sense from you as to what you see happening in the space with respect to governance in DevOps, and how we can kind of maybe move away from the herding cats mindset when it comes to governance.

    Williams: Yeah. It’s been a journey on DevOps. DevOps, when it was introduced many, many years ago as a concept immediately aligned itself with Agile, so it became only the ability to get things out as continuously as possible, and also as fast as possible. And so what happened is that at that time, things were very much managed. It was small teams doing lots of work. As enterprises started kicking in, with DevOps become a serious strategic way of actually delivering applications to their consumers, the amount of people got involved grew. 

      The amount of teams that were involved grew. Even though the DevOps philosophy was small teams, fast moving, application componentry going out into the ether as fast as possible, it stopped being that quite a while ago, and started becoming much more mainstream. So unfortunately, DevOps grew up a lot, and one of the things that became an issue was governance. And governance from that perspective wasn’t really just about security – y’know, SOC 2 compliance, and making sure that your secrets are held and managed efficiently across the pipeline – 

      but it was also around, how do you understand what people are doing? And what is the interaction that they’re having? And why are they having that interaction? And basically it’s a fragmentation challenge, more than anything else. DevOps pipelines are fragmented, and so how do you get control without inhibiting innovation? And how do you get visibility, having lots of teams that wanna innovate in their own areas, but not necessarily give you that full end to end? So that’s the challenge that has emerged. 

      And I think it’s going to continue to do that for quite a while to come, because the applications are getting bigger and more contention-based in regards to infrastructure sharing. So governance is gonna be the thing.

    O’Hanlon: It’s interesting, because I think of it a lot like a company itself growing out there. When you have two or three people working in a company, it can be very difficult to get a lot of achieved without everybody kinda going all in. But as a company grows, you’ve got more people who are doing the work, but maybe they’re not necessarily talking to each other, and not everybody has all the information they need. So you kind of have to kinda build a technology, or at least a process, around being able to get the information out and helping everybody be on the same page. 

      And it kinda sounds like the same thing is happening in the DevOps space with respect to just having a greater understanding. Not just an understanding of the process, but just, I guess, a better way of enabling the process from an understanding and a communication perspective – as well as just making sure that all the right things are getting done at the right time. So what do you guys propose? What do you see that you believe could make a real difference?

    Williams: You used two words that always make me smile when I talk DevOps. I used to be an analyst, talking to a lot of DevOps practitioners, and the two words that I used to run for the hills were “process;” y’know, that was one thing. And so they wanted collaboration, but they wanted to be able to collaborate without being governed in any way. So I think that that process word is one, and anything to do with “abstraction.” So abstraction’s not a good thing. It takes you away from the core. 

      So what I’m saying to you is that any solution that enables you to get greater control on governance and understanding has got to be able to do it without impeding people’s ability to do their jobs. And it’s gotta be something that is subsumed within their normal breathing in and out. It can’t be something that’s another job to do. That defeats the whole point of, anything that’s to do with lean practice is about removing stuff. We’re the software industry, so the way that we make things less complex is by adding something, y’know; that’s the normal inclination. 

      I think DevOps, when you actually use it, whatever you add into the mix has got to be subsumed within your normal day-to-day activities. So it can’t be yet another thing to do. For example, security has gotta be there, but not intrusive. Why I came to Quali was because I’d spent a lot of time with companies where infrastructure, the ability to provision into the cloud, do all the things, was becoming a bit of a mystery. People would assume infrastructure. 

      So the governance around what you’re deploying and how you’re provisioning your infrastructure not only became fragmented through your pipelines – Because you plan something, and then you code it, you build it, you release it, and test it, et cetera. Each one of those is a very defined area. It might be one person; it might be many teams. But each one of those is a very specific thing you have to do. But wouldn’t it be cool if you could subsume testing into your code? Wouldn’t it be cool if you could consume compliance while you’re coding? 

      So you’re coding, and it’s automatically looking at configurations and modifications, and logging that appropriately without you having to add another layer. And I think the same with infrastructure. I think that the companies I’ve worked for before really didn’t know what was going on, and I worked for DevOps companies that were trying to work out, “Okay, so the infrastructure was there; now it’s gone,” or “It’s there, and it’s modified.” 

      Every commit that a coder does is, y’know, a point in time. “So what has happened between that commit and the next commit?” And so all these stages of infrastructure, how do you build that in? So at Quali, what we looked at is providing a method with which you can let people use infrastructure as code practices, configuration management tools. Do what you need, but it gets automatically subsumed into a model. And the model is what you rate on. That’s what applies the policies around access and et cetera. 

      But it should allow the coders, the release managers, the testers to do what they need, but also it provides sort of like a control plane on top that enables you to talk and be governed, but without that Big Brother type of thing looking at you. So I think that’s the magic about DevOps, is if you add something in, it’s gotta be something that doesn’t get in the way of speed. It’s gotta not provide another barrier. It’s gotta do these things. It’s a hard problem to solve, but if you approach it in a way that assumes that people are going to do things, they’re gonna break stuff – 

      People do that; that’s what they do. They do their own stuff. They don’t like being told what to do. So if you can provide as subliminal a level of control over infrastructure that says, “I know how you’re doing it. I’m now going to provide that same capabilities that we used in build to help the testers understand what to build.” So now you’re providing some consistency across, using the control plane. So you’re using your models, and you’re moving them across. But it subsumes what they already use, so you can add it in. 

      Your infrastructure stack and the way that you deploy it is implemented in the model that has policy, access control, secrets integration. And so that’s really the philosophy, is to make sure that we can provide the end-to-end capabilities, accelerate the delivery life cycle, but not impede the practitioners from what they do, but provide the business with visibility which they do not have today. So I would just follow up by saying cost isn’t a governance thing, but unless you govern it, and you understand why you’re doing something, then how do you associate a cost of the cloud, if you can’t associate it with a pipeline? 

      At the moment, cost is associated with instances, and you’re having to group that together. What if you could provide the model with a value while you’re doing it, the application that you’re delivering on? And if you could do that, then you’re subtly applying what they do at the practitioner level with an application, with an owner, with a cost. So that is a way that governance actually comes in with the access, the controls, without being intrusive. We can basically provide all the capabilities there, and enable the business to get better visibility control over all sorts of things, including, for the first time, cost on the end to end. 

    O’Hanlon: Yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense. And in my mind – please tell me if I’m wrong – but it also means that the developers don’t really have to think about, how shall I say? They don’t actually have to learn more about something that would – If they’re moving from, say, a regular kind of a developer motion into more of a DevOps motion, it doesn’t require them to kinda add on a level of expertise that they might not need otherwise. This kinda does it for them, and kind of fills in the blanks for them, and also kinda helps other organizations or other teams within the organization understand the flow a little bit better, which makes a whole lot of sense. 

      And I think that may be part of kinda the governance conversation as well, is if we all have a greater level of understanding about what is happening at any particular time, we can better manage it.

    Williams: Yeah. I mean, secrets management, people hear a lot about that. They don’t quite know what it is when you talk to them about secrets management. I mean, something like a password or a username would be used maybe throughout a process, and it’s a shared piece of knowledge that you don’t wanna expose. So you keep that consistent throughout your environment, but keep the access controls consistent throughout whoever uses that access throughout the pipeline. One thing that we’ve learned is that DevOps isn’t a thing; it’s an interpretation of a thing. 

      The objective is very clear for people, but how they implement it can differ, depending on organization, application, design, et cetera. So what we also have to do is make sure that people with lesser skills – And I don’t mean lesser skills in regards to infrastructure; infrastructure can be cloud provisioned. But what if they have to manage all the networking components and the database instances, the things that aren’t inherent within a cloud-provisioning environment? 

      So we’ve gotta make sure that as developers of different skill levels interact with the infrastructure, we can fill the gaps for them, so they can do what they need to do, but if there’s networking, et cetera that needs to be managed, then the model should be something to give them the guardrails with which to implement that in support of the application requirements to that part of the pipeline. So it is something that we’re working on quite heavily, to make sure that we can get those guardrails in place.

    O’Hanlon: That’s great. And I think about all of the things that have kind of expanded DevOps, if you will, beyond the original parameters, including the implementation of DevSecOps, and the adoption –

    Williams: Yeah.

    O’Hanlon: – and DevNetOps, and all of these things that have kinda piled on top of DevOps. 

    Williams: [Chuckling] Yeah.

    O’Hanlon: It can be very, very difficult for the DevSecOps community, or the DevOps community, especially developers, to kinda have to manage all of that knowledge. So having those guardrails in place, I imagine, is going to be very well received by a lot of organizations, simply because we’re also talking about the dearth of talent in the developer community these days.

    Williams: Yeah.

    O’Hanlon: So anything that an organization can do to help ensure that there is a level of governance around the way their DevSecOps tools and practices and culture and everything is run, I think is a huge benefit. David, thanks very much for walking me through what you guys see happening with DevOps and governance. And hopefully this is an issue that is going to get better as we move forward. To your point, we do tend to throw technologies at problems, and hopefully this is one that will stick, if you know what I mean. 

    Williams: Yeah.

    O’Hanlon: So thanks again for your time. I do appreciate it.

    Williams: Right. Thank you, Charlene. It’s been a pleasure. 

    O’Hanlon: All right, everybody. Please stick around. We’ve got lots more Techstrong TV coming up, so stay tuned.

  • Techstrong TV: Recruiting Developers with the Right Skills

    Techstrong TV: Recruiting Developers with the Right Skills

    The biggest challenge facing the software industry is recruiting developers with the right skills, according to a Reveal’s third annual “Top Software Development Challenges for 2022” survey. Jason Beres, SVP of Developer Tools at Infragistics, and Charlene discuss how organizations can address these and other challenges effectively. The video is below followed by a transcript of the conversation.

    Charlene O’Hanlon: Hey everybody. Welcome back to TechStrong TV. I’m Charlene O’Hanlon and I’m here now with Jason Beres, who is the Senior Vice President of Developer Tools at Infragistics. Jason, thank you so much for taking a couple minutes and getting on the Zoom with me. I appreciate it. 

    Jason Beres: Thanks for having us, Charlene. Thank you.

    O’Hanlon: So I’m interested in talking with you a little bit about what you guys have seen over the last, I would say, year, year and a half of so, as it relates to developers, the great resignation, and the lack of qualified developers filling the roles these days, and the impact that that’s having on developer organization, especially as it relates to tools and tooling. So I wonder if we can set the stage a little bit, though. So, let’s talk about what you guys have seen in the market over the last year or so, as it pertains to the developer ranks. Are we seeing a lot of folks moving around?

    Beres: Yeah. It’s interesting, and the impetus to this interview is we just got a survey results back that we did. It went over a six week period, and we asked a lot of questions about what’s been going on in the last 18 months with developers. And this is a huge issue. It’s a huge issue for everyone, this lack of skills needed to move digital transformation forward. So developers are maybe looking at other career opportunities, maybe there’s new thing in the development space they want to do vs. what they did in the past. Maybe they don’t want to be a full staff web developer anymore, they want to get into AI, machine learning. And so there’s pockets that we see which are really having a hard time hiring. And you’re looking at numbers of 50 to 60 percent of companies having trouble finding skilled developers for positions. And Infragistics is no different. We’ve had positions open for almost a year for some job openings, and we have offices globally. We’ll hire anywhere. It’s a huge challenge, and I think it’s shifting the way organizations think about application development and tooling, and what they really need to move forward.

    O’Hanlon: I keep hearing about the great resignation, and the fact that everybody … not everybody … but a lot of people are rethinking where they want to be in life. And so they’re moving on to doing different things. But I almost feel like there’s got to be someplace where these people are going. So, is it really the great resignation, or do you think it’s just the great reshuffling? 

    Beres: Oh, wow. That’s a good way of putting it. I do think it’s a great reshuffling more than resignation. I think there’s pockets of the economy where it’s no doubt the great resignation. My brother is CFO of a trucking company. And they see that a lot of the truckers who couldn’t truck during the pandemic just retired. Or they’re like, “Man. Trucking’s really hard. I’m gonna go do something different, where I’m not on the road 60 hours a week.” So I think certain pockets of the economy are more affected than software developers, but I think software developers are the type of folks that need a challenge. So they’re always looking to be having the next big thing that maybe is not necessarily resume padding. It’s more about I need to be challenged more, and I’m looking at other options. And, by the way, I can get a 25 percent raise doing it. That’s … I think what’s driving it is you see big tech … The interesting thing is, right now what you see is, in terms of Meta, for example, the Metaverse, big tech is just … they’re taking people from each other now with ridiculous salaries. So where a guy might have made X amount, they’re offering three times that amount to go between Facebook, Google, Microsoft.

    So, in a smaller business, I don’t think it’s as bad as that, but it really depends where you’re at. Infragistics happens to be headquartered in New Jersey, or a 45 minute train ride into New York City. There’s a lot of big tech in New York City, so folks are really, “Hey. Should I take the risk? Can I still work from home?” Now work from home is a big benefit, and I think one of the risks that big tech sees is, “Well is that … hey we’re gonna make folks start coming in the office.” And a lot of people are like, “No, please don’t make us do that, or I will look elsewhere.” So I think the great reshuffle maybe is a better way of putting it, as you’ve described, in software development specifically.

    O’Hanlon: And I also see that a lot of developers, over the course of the pandemic, they used a lot of their … I won’t say free time, ’cause I don’t think anybody really had free time, but they were using some of their down time to really up level their skills. And so they’re shifting now into newer areas of development where, to your point earlier, maybe they’re more interested in AI. So they now have that skill set to be able to do that. So are you guys seeing that there are certain levels of developers, or certain areas that are seeing larger pockets of open positions over others? Are we looking at more entry level positions that are not being filled these days?

    Beres: I think what we’re seeing, and again, we have offices all over the place, in the US, in South America, in Eastern Europe and Western Europe, in Japan, and in India. And each one of those offices has unique problems. So, for example, in South America, I think we’re seeing just the development skill levels are continuing to rise. So maybe five years ago you could hire a lot of really junior people, and you could get them for less money. Now you’re hiring more senior people who are looking for a little bit more money, but they’re looking for more of a challenge. I think there’s more junior people maybe in locations in Eastern Europe that we didn’t see before, but the risk there is you hire someone who’s junior, and then they’re gonna jump ship relatively quickly, maybe in a year, maybe in 18 months, once they feel like, “Hey, wait a minute. I can go make life changing money, which might be a 20 percent raise when you’re in your early 20s just out of school, but that’s like a big stepping stone for you moving forward.

    So I do see that it’s challenging in each location. But at the same time, I think everyone up leveled. If you’re serious about your career, you did have more time last year, and the year before. You weren’t on the road for an hour, hour and a half. Folks that used to work in New York, as you know, would spend maybe two to three hours in a train, jammed together with other people, and they couldn’t even read a book. 

    O’Hanlon: Yeah. Been there, done that.

    Beres: So now they’re at home, and they’re taking free courses. And so you look at some of these training companies, even LinkedIn Learning, they’ve exploded in the last couple years, among others. And there’s training companies that ten years ago were nothing. Now they’re billion dollar companies, because of online training. And so I think if you’re serious about your career, you did up level, and you’re looking for other opportunities. Another one I didn’t mention before is Data Science. Data Science happens to be just exploding, of course, and maybe three to five years ago there were no data scientists. They were so hard to find. They were all career switchers. Maybe I was a really analytical guy, so I’m gonna try out this data science. Now, they’ve learned. Data Scientists are there, but they’re making still the bigger money. So it’s interesting how salaries have just shifted with the market over time as well.

    O’Hanlon: We’re seeing such upheaval everywhere. We think about the supply chain. We think about the people who are shifting jobs, and there’s so much in flux these days. It’s hard to pin things down. It’ll be interesting to see how things settle out over the next year or so. I think we are gonna see some settling over the next 12 months as, quote/unquote, things get back to normal, or somewhat sense of normal.

    Beres: We hope.

    O’Hanlon: Yeah. As we are seeing all of these things happening, all of these different forces at play, that’s gotta have an impact on the organization as a whole, beyond the human element. So what are you guys seeing with respect to tool sprawl, and other ways in which maybe the DevOps tool chain is being impacted, or just the whole developer experience is changing from an organizational point of view.

    Beres: I think what we do see is that the business is moving forward, no matter what. So businesses, and even in our survey, they’re looking at 10 percent growth, 20 percent growth. No one reported that they expect negative growth. They expect positive growth. And I think so many businesses … and it’s not just small businesses. It’s medium size businesses, and even like maybe silos in big tech realize that they were behind. So the pandemic said, or it really told them that they need to catch up. And so the business wants to grow, they want to move forward. So that’s when we start recognizing these gaps in skill sets and training, and things that we really wanted to do but we really can’t do ’cause we don’t have the people to do it, or we don’t have the right skill sets to do it, we waited too long. We didn’t move to the cloud. Well, why didn’t you move to the cloud? Gartner’s been saying move to the cloud for ten years, but you didn’t move to the cloud.

    So what happens is there’s more pressure put on dev teams, the backlogs get longer. So the way that affects the tool chain, the way that we see it affecting the tool chain in a typical enterprise, and even in SMB, is that tools like low code, no code tools are becoming more adopted, more trusted maybe. Organizations, IT is opening things up a little bit where maybe they’ll allow some APIs that maybe a marketing or sales team can use to do self service BI, or to create apps that aren’t business mission critical, but will help them be more productive. So we’ve seen a little bit of a shift there, and I think we see market growth there as well, in the last couple years, where the business of embedded analytics and low code, no code, were still in the billions of dollars, but billions of dollars in that upper scale, big tech. Now it’s being more widely adopted across the board and pushed down in SMB as well.

    O’Hanlon: Like I said before, I think we’re gonna see a lot of changes happening over the year as things settle down. Do you think that we’re going to see changes as it relate to how organizations actually choose their tools, and make the big decisions around that? How do you think that’s gonna be changing?

    Beres: So again, the pandemic taught everyone, you can’t be … you’re not beholden by the resources of IT as it is today. Or else you will be left behind. Digital transformation needs to happen, teams need to be more productive. You look at Microsoft and the explosion of Microsoft Teams, and this workspace collaboration. So, we see a growth in these types of tools. We see a growth of the number of people that are just gonna remain as a remote workforce, and then management, IT management and executive management at software companies is realizing that we need productivity. So how can we inject tooling that still give us what we need in terms of security, capabilities, user experience, but can move us forward in how we’re delivering applications internally and externally. So we see a lot of … before the pandemic there was a lot of talk about UX. So UX is top of mind in every executive meeting. But, did they really care about UX? Well now that everyone is, the consumerization has happened, your internal applications experience is just as important as your customer basing experiences. You need tooling that helps you do that more. So bringing in better user experience, tooling that can help deliver applications that look better, feel better, have a better experience, that are gonna drive internal growth, and obviously, external customer growth, really becomes critical and important. And in the next 12 months, in the next 18 months when things are starting to flesh out, these tools are here to stay.

    And again, there’s just not enough skilled workers. And if, for example, we can bring in a low code, no code tool to automate process and the super power user in the marketing or sales team, or even a junior dev can do it, vs. having to hire a team to build something from scratch, that’s where we see the savings, and that’s where we see this acceleration of the digital transformation in the enterprise.

    O’Hanlon: I really, really like the fact that over the past couple years, we’ve seen this whole democratization of just technology in general. And the fact that, to your point, somebody in finance or marketing or someplace an actually go in and make these changes, and in nine times out of ten actually get it done faster than if they had sent it over to the IT team to get it done. I think there’s really been a sea change, and it’s going to continue. How it ultimately impacts IT organizations, right now is pretty much anybody’s guess. But with the great resignation happening, and still happening, or the great reshuffling … I just like that word better … the great reshuffling happening, we’re gonna see a lot of changes, I think, to the way organizations view how they … not just how they utilize technology, but also maybe how they utilize their employees. That may be another conversation for another time.

    But Jason, thank you so much for having the conversation with me today.

    Beres: Thank you.

    O’Hanlon: And we look forward to having future conversations with you.

    Beres: Absolute. Thank you very much.

    O’Hanlon: Alright. Great.

    Alright everybody. Please stick around. We’ve got lots more TechStrong TV coming up, so stay tuned.

  • Techstrong TV: The Use of AI in Low-Code

    Techstrong TV: The Use of AI in Low-Code

    In this talk, Dave Wright, Chief Innovation Officer of ServiceNow, talks about how low-code is accelerating organizations’ AI journeys and is expanding into new, scalable use cases as we move into a post-COVID-19 world. The video and a transcript of the conversation are below.

    Recorded Voice:         This is Digital Anarchist.

     

    Charlene O’Hanlon:   Hey, everybody. Welcome back to TechStrong TV. I am Charlene O’Hanlon and I’m here now with Dave Wright, who is the chief innovation officer over at ServiceNow. Dave, thanks so much for taking a couple minutes and talking with me today. Always appreciate it.

     

    Dave Wright:              No, thanks for the opportunity.

     

    Charlene O’Hanlon:   Okay, great. So first, I’m really interested in your title, chief innovation officer. What’s that all about? Tell me.

     

    Dave Wright:              So it has multiple roles I suppose. Part of it is looking at how we understand what customers are doing with the products, so looking at customer stories, building out reference cases. Some of it is looking at what we do around the world of evangelism and looking at how we talk about what the technology does.

    And a lot of it is around looking at new technology and trying to understand, is that new technology gonna impact us in any way, or do we need to potentially look at some of these new areas of areas that we can move into to as well. So, it’s pretty cool. I get to spend a lot of time researching things. I get to speak to people, everyone from psychiatrists and sociologists all the way through to technologists. So it’s a pretty cool job.

     

    Charlene O’Hanlon:   Yeah, sounds pretty nifty. All right. Well, I wanna talk to you about low-code and it’s something that – We’ve been talking a lot about low-code over the last 18 months or so. It seems to have – I almost kind of feel like we’ve jumped the shark on the topic, but I wanna talk to you about artificial intelligence and the use of AI in low-code as organizations are swiftly adopting it and recognizing the real value that low-code has for the business.

    Obviously, AI is kind of icing on the cake, if you will, if it’s done correctly. So, interested in getting your thoughts on the role of AI in low-code and maybe kind of see what’s going on in the industry, what you’re seeing there.

     

    Dave Wright:              So I think a lot of times when people produce low-code applications, one of the things they’re really trying to drive is adoption of those applications. So when you build something, it’s gotta be better than whatever people were using before. And I think that when people start to integrate artificial intelligence into those low-code apps, what actually does is it starts to elevate the experience a little bit.

    So, it makes sure that the application you create actually delivers smarter outcomes. And this can be anything from ease of use of the application. So how do you start to process data and collect data in a different way? Or it can be the actions that the application then takes. So how does it learn from more and more people using the system to gradually improve and modify the experience to make it easier to use?

    So I think those are elements that you see people building in conversationally, or you see people building in with ML models. I think there’s probably a second part of the conversation, and maybe we’re not quite there yet, but I think in the future, you’ll actually start to see artificial intelligence influence the coding side of low-code. So actually helping people develop those applications as well, but we can go into that a bit more later.

     

    Charlene O’Hanlon:   Yeah. Well, that’s actually kind of one of the things that I was thinking about, because if we’re talking about low-code as a business enabler, so obviously we’ve got a lot of folks out there creating code or creating applications using low-code, and who don’t really have that experience in coding.

    So I imagine AI is kind of like a tutor to – That’s how I view it as AI within the low code application being used as kind of maybe the conscience of the voice of reasons. Like, “Are you really sure you wanna do that in that application?” Or just kind of helping them build a better application and user experience as part of that.

    So I guess we’re kind of talking about two different things. We’re talking about low-code and AI, because we could be building AI application using low-code technologies, or we could be using AI within the low-code application.

    So, are both of them kind of happening right now? And then, do we really need to distinguish exactly what we’re talking about in our conversation? And we could be talking about both of them, which is fine. I’m totally okay with that, but –

     

    Dave Wright:              So I think the both happening, the one that’s happening the most is people using AI within low-code applications. So that’s gonna happen on multiple levels. So it could be I’m building an application where part of it is collecting data or it’s interfacing to a person. So that might be the inclusion of things like virtual agents.

    And this is where you start to get into the real benefit of low-code developments. When you’ve got pro-code developments, you go out there and you build something, you’ve got a program of entirely skill that can build out exactly the interface you want, can build out the data structure.

    When it comes to something like that, building a national language understanding conversation, , it’s not the programming that’s hard, it’s the subject matter expertise, it’s knowing what to ask and what to ask next.

    So if you can put that capability to build those conversations into the hand of the SMA without them having to be some programming god, then it means that the conversations flow more naturally and you get what you want. So I think being able to enable people to build those types of interfaces when they haven’t got the programming skills, really speeds up what happens in the world of low-code development.

    And then I think you have the second part of it, where perhaps it’s using machine learning algorithms to then simplify processes. So, a great example of that is, let’s say you build an application and in that application, you’re gonna describe a certain type of request that you’ve got or something that you need.

    And what you do in a traditional non-AI powered system is, then you walk the user through some system where they had to categorize what type of issue it was. And then based on the categorization, you’d pass it to someone to execute. But if you can put, let’s say a machine learning step in that, where it looks at the description, and it goes, “Okay, based on this, I know what type of request this is, so I’m gonna categorize it.”

    Then you start to, A, remove the potential for human failure, where someone miscategorizes, but you also start to think about how you design your interfaces, because now you don’t need drop-down lists.

    So you merge and you take that app, you mobilize it, you put it on a mobile device. You can have a much more cleaner, simpler interface, because a lot of the work around data collection and data determinations being done by ML algorithms sitting in the background.

     

    Charlene O’Hanlon:   That’s interesting. I hear so much about low-code actually being used within an organization to create kind of those secondary internal business applications or internal business processes, and then kind of leaving the big stuff, the customer-facing stuff out to the developers themselves. But it sounds like, with this infusion of AI into the low-code applications, that may not necessarily be true forever?

     

    Dave Wright:              Probably not. I mean, I think the use case that you talked about them, where people are doing it for business applications, or maybe not business applications, the way I see people building them are applications for core operations. And it depends which area of business you go to.

    So you might go to a financial Institute and they’re looking at how they do loan processing, or you might go to a hospital and they might be looking at how they do clinician onboarding or how they set own emergency medical centers. So it tends to be something that’s very close to your core business, what you’re all about, that things don’t necessarily come off the shelf and that you need that specialist knowledge to build. So that’s where you see it now.

    I think moving forward, perhaps we start to see this concept of people using it for much wider use cases and starting to build bigger and bigger applications, or perhaps even more interesting, starting to chain the applications together. So there is also wrong application is actually driving something in another.

    And then we have concepts like the bigger AI models that we start to see emerging now. So some of these large language learning models, the GCP three-type concepts where you are starting to look at the capability to be able to describe an application and then have AI build that application based on the description. That’s an interesting development, and it’ll be interesting to see where that goes in the next two or three years.

     

    Charlene O’Hanlon:   Yeah, that is definitely something that I think is fascinating, but it’s also slightly frightening if you just tell the robot to go build something or the machine to go build it. So, with that in mind though, are we starting to see a shift in the way developers, their roles moving forward, because we are in effect kind of taking away at least some of the remote or the rote tasks that they do these days, kind of the lower through low-code and AI. So how do you see that changing, how developers view their jobs and what they actually do?

     

    Dave Wright:              So I think a lot of the things with artificial intelligence in the role of developments will be the same that we’ve seen the way that artificial intelligence works in the regular world. So what most people use artificial intelligence for is to either improve the accuracy or remove the mundaneness to try and take some of the stuff that people just don’t wanna focus on away.

    And I think that’s where you’ll start to see the first AI use cases in the world of developments where people are looking at standard routines that they use, or they’re looking at tasks that they just – They wanna focus on the complex side of it and have the simple side of the stuff just built from –

    So that coordination and that orchestration of being able to take what you need to be able to build the application. I think it’ll be it more AI as an assistant to programmers. I did a presentation a few weeks ago and someone said, “Does this mean AI is gonna replace all the programmers in the world?” And that’s not true. It’s no more than it’s gonna replace all the artists in the world, so that [crosstalk] in the thought process still sits in a program’s mind.

     

    Charlene O’Hanlon:   Yeah. And there’s also a level of experience and expertise that developers bring that low-code never could. If you’ve got somebody working with a low-code technology who is not a developer, they might not see the things that might trip up the program the way a developer might see.

    So I firmly believe that obviously there will always be a place for developers in the development environment, but I do certainly see the value of low-code. Even though I was joking at the top of our conversation that I kind of feel like low-code may have jumped the shark, but I think that there are so many different and practical use cases for low-code technology in organizations that are technology organizations, or they just happen to build sneakers or something like that.

    There’s always gonna be an application there where a part of what they do, whether it’s customer-facing or internal, they won’t necessarily have to even bother the developers or the IT part of the organization to get those things done. So yeah, I think low-code is actually going to kind of permeate the entire organization moving forward. It’s a matter of time. And I think AI is gonna be a huge enabler for that.

     

    Dave Wright:              I think so. I mean, if I look at our world, if I look at ITS ServiceNow’s world and how people build up on the platform there, we’ve done things like introduced the concept of app engine studio to make it simple for people to build apps if they can’t code. But then even on top of that, more and more people have said, “Hey, can we have standard templates?”

    Because a lot of people are gonna say, “Well, I’m gonna build an application.” And all the application really is, is an approval process, the way to track something being approved, or it’s a way to track leave, or it’s a way to track something that’s really simple that people do every day. “Can you just give me a template that allows me to go in and be able to do that?”

    So we’ve seen that concept already start to emerge, but the thing that always surprises me is, I’ll speak to businesses and some people say, “Well, even though you call it low-code people still need a bit of skill to be able to build these things. But I always think the irony of that is I’ve seen people do things in Excel that I couldn’t do in a million years.

    The complexity of the stuff they’ve got in the background, it’s like, “Wow, I don’t know if I can build a low-code app.” We’ve moved on quite a bit now, the concept of low code is available to everyone.

     

    Charlene O’Hanlon:   I think it’s amazing and I think it’s great technology. And we’ve been covering low-code on devopsy.kinsta.cloud for, going on five years now. So, it’s obviously been a technology that’s kind of been waiting in the wings for its moment. And the pandemic really highlighted its value to organizations.

    And I firmly believe it is here to stay and I’m excited about seeing how it can be extended in an organization and really bring a lot more business value than it is currently. So Dave, thank you so much for having the conversation with me, always enjoyable. And hopefully, maybe this time next year, we can have another conversation on the same topic and see where we are compared to where we are today.

     

    Dave Wright:              I would love to do that. All right. Thanks so much.

     

    Charlene O’Hanlon:   It sounds great. All right. All right. Well, thanks again, Dave, for your time. I really do appreciate it. All right, everybody, please stick around. We’ve got lots more TechStrong TV coming out. So stay tuned.

     

    [End of Audio]

  • Virtual Reality in the Workplace

    Virtual Reality in the Workplace

    Jonathan and Charlene discuss Moderne’s use of virtual reality—specifically, the Oculus VR system—as a collaboration tool for its disparate developer team and demonstrate how the groups works in the Workroom app. The video is above and a transcript of the conversation is below.

     

    Interviewer:                This is Digital Anarchist.

    Hey, everybody, welcome back to Techstrong TV. I am Charlene O’Hanlon, and I am here now with Jonathan Schneider, who is the cofounder and CEO of Moderne. Jonathan, thank you so much for getting on the Zoom and talking with me today. I really do appreciate it.

     

    Interviewee:                Always a pleasure.

     

    Interviewer:                So, I wanna talk to you about something that I’m super stoked about, actually. It’s the virtual reality and the way organizations can actually use virtual reality to their benefit. And I know your organization has kind of started doing a lot of your work in a virtual environment, in the Workrooms app on the Oculus, too. So, tell me a little bit about that, why you guys decided to go that route, and maybe some of the benefits that you guys have noticed with it.

     

    Interviewee:                Absolutely. I think it is good to say, upfront, that we started with a great degree of skepticism about this whole technology and approach, and I’m sure many of your listeners will, as well. I heard of podcasts three or four months ago, really, talking about how virtual reality could really start in the business first, and move towards more of a consumer use case, and I just needed to really understand. So, _____ we started small, we actually ordered one headset, initially, just to understand it, experience it, ’cause, you know, I’d never had any experience with VR. Then expanded it to two other employees, and it’s kind of gradually expanded since then. We just, we’ve been working on Zoom, our company is all remote, there’s 12 of us, we’ve actually never met in person, that’s probably not surprising, and we just felt a lack of presence and connection. So, it’s just a way of actually sitting together, and, surprisingly, that feeling comes across more than you think it would.

     

    Interviewer:                You know, it’s really interesting technology, and, you know, we’re gonna show the audience, in just a few minutes, exactly what it looks like and how you guys interact in the room. But, you know, it’s really fascinating to hear about the different ways that organizations are kind of dealing with this hybrid or all-remote work environment. And I remember, at the beginning of the pandemic, there were some companies that were trying to do standups in, like, Animal Crossing and different environments, just to kind of mix it up and make it seem like, you know, it’s not just like every day is an endless Zoom meeting. So, it’s really fascinating to me that we have kind of harnessed, if you will, this technology, and made it so much more than, you know, an endless Zoom meeting. And I wonder, when you guys set out to do this, I mean, were you actively looking for another approach to collaboration? Or is this just something that you guys decided, “Well, we’ll give it a try and see how it works”?

     

    Interviewee:                We did it opportunistically. I feel like more modes of communication are rarely a bad thing. You know, of course, we already had Zoom – really, it’s just, it was an inexpensive investment. You know, these headsets are about $300.00 each, relative to the cost of a laptop, which, you know, we regularly send out to employees, is very little. And so I thought, you know, if it would give us a greater sense of presence or, you know, connection, it’s worth that kind of investment, and so, that’s how we really approached it. You know, it’s gonna be easy, I think, as a skeptic, to say, “Look, we should be meeting in person, we should be, you know – we shouldn’t be escaping into a virtual world to escape reality.” And I think we’re not at all about escaping reality; it’s about adding additional modes of communication that can help when we aren’t able to be together in person.

     

    Interviewer:                So, what exactly are you doing in the Workroom? Are you spending all day long in it, or are you doing standups, or just ad hoc meetings? Or what is your kind of mode with the Workroom?

     

    Interviewee:                It’s sometimes standup, although not every day, and, you know, it’s generally ad hoc. So these headsets, right now, are wireless, the battery life is about an hour-and-a-half, so, you know, you don’t stay in there the entire day. We’ve reached a point where we’re comfortable being in there for an hour-and-a-half, if we want to be. But, you know, just to relay an event from a couple weeks ago, I was working on a production issue with one of our engineers, and there were two of us sitting side by side in this room, one of our screens was projected largely on the board in front, and we were working through this issue. Another member of the team joined the room thinking, “Maybe I’ll contribute to solving this problem.” He actually wasn’t able to; he just, like, he didn’t have the context.

    But he just kept sitting there, and he was here looking at desk working, and just kind of absorbing this background information debugging this problem. And I thought, “That is an experience I haven’t had since, you know, I’ve sat in an open-floor plan office, in years.”

     

    Interviewer:                So, I imagine your employees also, when you guys first started doing this, they were also a little skeptical of it? Or were they just really gung-ho to give it a try?

     

    Interviewee:                Mostly skeptical, I would say. You know, the first two – you know, I said we did three headsets, originally. We picked two people that were interested and engaged, but most people were skeptical. And again, I was, too. It’s just a low-cost investment. I suggest try it. And it won’t be for everybody, I think.

     

    Interviewer:                And have you had more people in your organization say, you know, “Count me in. This is the way I wanna work from now on”?

     

    Interviewee:                I think it’s gradually that way. I think, right now, the technology is – it’s pretty polished, but there’s definitely rough edges. I think the next-generation devices resolution is gonna be significantly better, you know, _____ _____ _____ battery life will increase. This very much feels like the early PC era, and being a business that’s adopting a technology that ultimately will be pretty ubiquitous, I think. And so, it’s really an organization question: do you wanna be on the leading edge of this or do you wanna be behind? I think, you know, I run an enterprise B2B software company, and we work on developer tools, and we work with developers all the time. We’ve actually had customer engineers voluntarily join us in our room, to work with us on an implementation issue, but then they’ll come back and just hang out later.

    So, I mean, there’s this mode of connection, even with customers outside the company, that I think is really compelling. Especially, you know, small companies, we’re always looking for any advantage we have [laughter], ’cause we have plenty of disadvantages. And this is one, I think, that we can really.

     

    Interviewer:                Well, that’s great, that’s great. So, why don’t we go ahead and jump into the Workroom, and we can check it out and you can kind of give me the grand tour, as it were. Sound good?

     

    Interviewee:                [Crosstalk] See you there.

     

    Interviewer:                All right, great, great.

    Well, this is an amazing environment, here. I love the fact that you guys are all able to get together. So, where is everybody located, in real-life?

     

    Interviewee:                I’m in Chico, California.

     

    Interviewee:                I’m in Portland, Oregon.

     

    Interviewee:                Austin, Texas.

     

    Interviewee:                Southwest Missouri.

     

    Interviewee:                Sacramento, California.

     

    Interviewer:                Okay, all right, great. So have you guys ever met each other in real-life?

     

    Interviewee:                A few of us, yeah, like, we used to – some of us worked together, previously. And then, we’ve had an opportunity to go up to Seattle and meet folks up there.

     

    Interviewer:                Okay, great. So, how do you guys like working in this virtual environment? I mean, do you notice any limitations to it, or do you find it pretty easy to use?

     

    Interviewee:                Mm, that’s a big question. [Laughter]

     

    Interviewee:                I thin both of those are true.

     

    Interviewee:                They are, yeah.

     

    Interviewee:                It’s really nice to be able to get together and work collaboratively on something in what feels like a physical space, but this is, and Jonathan talks about, this is a Generation One technology of this. And, like, you can see some people’s keyboards, like, I can see Jonathan’s keyboard over here, but you can’t see mine, because my keyboard’s not supported, yet. So I have to have this pass-through mode, so it looks like a ghost version of my desk right in front of me.

     

    Interviewee:                Yeah, text input for me is still a little – I’m kind of – I guess I have high expectations and I’m a little picky [laughter] about, you know, the typing and then being able to see it. And, you know, I recently had to get contacts, so, the Quest 2 headset uses your distance vision as, you know, like, of your prescription, so I have bifocals, normally. So, you know, your options are, like, third-party _____ that go on your lenses, or I went the contacts route, so that I could see [laughs], so that I could actually see things inside. So, that’s, yeah, that’s something to be concerned about.

     

    Interviewer:                Interesting. From a collaboration standpoint, though, are you guys finding it easier to be able to see, like, the same thing all at once and actually manipulate it or make edits to it? It seems like more real-time than real-time.

     

    Interviewee:                It did remind me a little bit of going to the WeWork [crosstalk] company we had at WeWork, and, you know, just being able to kind of hop in and out while other people are kind of doing their thing. And, you know, you’re sitting here and you’re actually talking, and it’s more real-life than Zoom, because it’s three-dimensional, you know, and there’s spatial awareness that, you know, you’re turning your head and things that you’re not doing on Zoom. So, Zoom, it’s very artificial, you know, it’s very 2D. So, those parts of collaboration, in my mind, are, like, the main benefit to it. The, you know, the various, like, logistical things, I think, like, Jonathan’s right, it’s, like, it needs to mature, significantly, before it will be not an annoyance, you know, to your normal workday, right? Like, you don’t want anything slowing you down; you only want to get the good value out of things, and it’s gonna take some maturation for that to happen, in the technology itself.

     

    Interviewee:                So, one of my favorite things about this is, you can see me holding the controller, here, and then, it doesn’t show you my other hand, but this bottom part, here – so this becomes a marker, as you get close. And so you just, like, writing, like, in this format, so. And I’m not writing on any physical surface, but it really feels like I am.

     

    Interviewer:                Huh –

     

    Interviewee:                Yeah, the controller gives you haptic feedback, when you get close to the whiteboard. You also can do the whiteboard on your local desk, and if you have your desk height set correctly, then you get the physical sensation of touching the controller to your desk, which is also another way to draw on there. You know, fine details and things like that, I think, are easier to communicate using that rather than just relying on [crosstalk].

     

    Interviewee:                Oh, [crosstalk].

     

    Interviewee:                Hello. [Laughter]

     

    Interviewer:                Okay. You guys, like, blend into each other, here.

     

    Interviewee:                Apparently, I picked the same location [crosstalk]. There we go.

     

    Interviewee:                And, you know, interestingly, I feel like personal space is still a thing, even in VR. You wouldn’t think that it would be, but, you know, if somebody, like, appears next to you in the table, it’s sort of like, “Oh, wait a minute, you’re kind of closer than you would be in real-life.” [Laugher] You know, you’re, like, in real-life, we’d never be sitting this close to each other, right, unless we were, like, directly communicating over a shared topic.

     

    Interviewee:                And it’s weird when they go to reach for something in their area, but, you know, it’s actually your area in the virtual space.

     

    Interviewee:                Yeah, you go to set down your controllers and you’re, like, putting your hands through your neighbor [laughter] [crosstalk].

     

    Interviewer:                This is awesome. So, are you guys, I don’t know, would you consider yourselves sold on this technology? Is it something that you guys wanna continue doing and utilizing, especially as it becomes more advanced and maybe user-friendly?

     

    Interviewee:                Hundred percent.

     

    Interviewee:                Yeah, I’m not sure that “sold” is, like, there’s nothing to sell. It is the future, right, like, it’s coming. Even if you don’t like it, like, this is the future of how we’re gonna do remote work. I’m just pretty convinced that that’s the case. I don’t see, you know, any other trend or anything in remote work that’s going to, like, overtake. This is going to just continue to get better, and, you know, the graphics and resolution, the frame rate’s gonna get better, you know, mixed reality rather than complete virtual reality, all of these things are gonna contribute to just a better remote work experience, I think, all the way around.

     

    Interviewer:                Well, that’s cool. Yeah, well, I would say that just this short introduction has really kind of shown me the capabilities and how it really can – I mean, I think this would’ve been awesome, well, even more awesome, if we had this two years ago at the beginning of the pandemic, when everybody was trying to, you know, figure out how they’re gonna work remotely fulltime. This would’ve been the way, you know, and then we wouldn’t be having these conversations about whether people should go back into the office or work fully remote or hybrid. I think that this would just be the way, moving forward, and everybody would recognize that. I think if I had one complaint about it, it’s the fact that these headsets are heavy. [Multiple “yeah” remarks] But, so, you know, I think as the technology improves, we’re gonna see a lot more companies adopt this.

     

    Interviewee:                Mm-hmm, totally agree, yeah. I mean, all of the mobile technology that has been building in all of the, you know, like, Apple devices, just consider the amount of complexity that’s in a handheld iPhone. And, you know, that’s all gonna be going into the headsets, you know, that high-resolution retina screens, you know, the game development algorithms, and the, you know, unity and all of the libraries that go with it, like, all of this stuff is – it’s not disconnected. It’s, like, totally, you know, the ecosystem that is sort of coalescing around this idea of augmented reality but virtual reality, right, totally made up reality that’s augmented by, you know, our presence. So, in that sense, it’s [crosstalk].

     

    Interviewer:                Yeah, it’s an immersive reality [crosstalk], yeah, awesome.

     

    Interviewee:                Yes, that’s a good way to look at it.

     

    Interviewer:                Well, guys, thank you very much for walking me through. This has been fascinating, and I gotta tell you that I am – I was a bit skeptical, but not anymore. I think that this is a great technology and you guys are doing great stuff with it, so, thanks again for showing me. I do appreciate it. All right, thank you, Jonathan.

     

    [End of Audio]

  • Techstrong TV: Closing the Diversity Gap in Tech Careers

    Techstrong TV: Closing the Diversity Gap in Tech Careers

    Charlene and Liliana discuss closing the gap in diversity in careers in tech. Learning to code can be a beneficial skill for traditionally underrepresented demographics, leading to more employment opportunities. The video and a transcript of the conversation are below.



    Recorded Voice:         This is Digital Anarchist.

     

    Charlene O’Hanlon:   Hey everybody, welcome back to Techstrong TV. I’m Charlene O’Hanlon and I’m here now with Liliana Monge, who is the cofounder and CEO of Sabio Coding Bootcamp. Liliana, thank you so much for joining me today, I really do appreciate it.

     

    Liliana Monge:           Thank you so much for having me. I’m super excited to have this conversation.

     

    O’Hanlon:   Excellent, excellent. Well we are happy to have you here, especially because I, I really do appreciate the efforts that you guys are doing through your coding bootcamp and really want to give you guys a little boost up if you will by a little bit of free promotion.

     

                                     But let’s talk about what you guys are doing. What, tell me a little bit about Sabio Boot, ah, Coding Bootcamp.

     

    Monge:       Yeah, so we started in the fall of 2013 in Los Angeles. Back then we had a very singular focus to make sure that the LA ecosystem was really going to be diverse. There was you know Los Angeles kind of at one point in time really lived in the shadows of San Francisco, of Silicon Valley and you know I would say in 2010, 2011 things really started to get heated up, more venture capitalists started to come into the state, a lot more companies started going public, such as Cornerstone OnDemand. So we knew what was going to happen in terms of all of this amazing wealth creation and jobs.

     

                                     So my partner and I, my cofounder, Gregorio and I, decided that we wanted to make sure that the ecosystem in California and Los Angeles was going to be diverse. So we set up a really innovative program that allows any adult who is smart and motivated to become a software developer within a very short period of time. So it’s very practical training. We were a hundred percent dedicated to helping women, more Latinos, more Black people, people who are underrepresented in tech like military veterans join this innovation economy.

     

    O’Hanlon:   That’s great, that’s great. And I’ve spoken with folks in other cities who basically have the same idea to, to really bring up the, you know rise up the traditionally underrepresented communities when it comes to technology. And it really surprises me how many start with these coding bootcamps or these coding classes. It seems like that is kind of the cornerstone of so many IT jobs these days. So I mean do you see a lot of folks entering the tech space using that particular avenue, the coding or, or is it do you think that it is kind of fundamental these days?

     

    Monge:       So I do think it’s definitely fundamental and it is a solution that can be applied pretty much throughout the United States or the world at this time, especially because we see the cost of hardware has come down significantly. That is a barrier to entry, right? You have to kind of have your own machine which is you know that, that needs to run VC software. As we all know software engineers run quite VC software. So you have to start with a price point of somewhere around you know $1500.00 to $2000.00 so that every person has the equipment they need, so that can be a barrier.

     

                                     However, once if you find a way to overcome the hardware barrier, you also have to make sure that there’s reliable internet, right, because all the information is on the internet, you’re posting to AWS Cloud probably your code and things like that. So there are two barriers.

     

                                     But then the last component, which is curriculum and practical training to become a software engineer I would say that is probably the most prolific. There is so much curriculum out there. So we decided to build our own custom curriculum. However, there are other organizations that release curriculum that’s available. There’s also a bunch of free stuff. Vendors many times have free resources. So it is a very wonderful solution to help any population.

     

                                     You know there’s so much going on right now. Like let’s say in Appalachia where the economy is changing and so people are like, “Is this a possible solution?” Miami is going through a massive transformation, right? They were known for hospitality, for travel, for leisure and now it’s just got this massive tech injection. So you can see how you can really take a coding bootcamp and kind of pluck it anywhere and if there is an ecosystem that’s going to support it, it can definitely create an amazing tech workforce anywhere in the country.

     

    O’Hanlon:   Yeah, I, I find it especially in, in urban areas that these coding bootcamps are, are cropping up. And I wonder if that’s also kind of I don’t want to call it a “substitute,” but maybe another avenue for especially kids coming out of high school that don’t really have maybe the means to go to a four-year college and then there are some people who don’t see the value in a four-year college, they just want to do the tech school route and get, get a basic understanding of what they need to do and then, and then go out and enter the workforce.

     

                                     So do you see these, ah, the important or the, the popularity of these coding bootcamps do you see them as more of a kind of a just a step for or these transitional and especially traditional under-represented communities a way for them to, to get the resources, to get the education they need without having to spend four years in college? Or do you see it more as they’re looking at it as, “I don’t want to go to college, but I do want to learn a trade and I want to…you know I see that there is value in coding because tech is the future.” So where, where are you kind of seeing people joining the bootcamps from?

     

    Monge:       Yeah, so that’s a fantastic question. When we began we thought we were going to be able to take students who graduated from high school and enroll in the program. However, we have found that 18-19-year-olds are a little bit too young to think about, “In three months I’m going to be a professional.”

     

    O’Hanlon:   Okay.

     

    Monge:       So we will enroll people who are that young and there’s always like 1 out of you know 40 that are 18 or 19, however, across the county and coding bootcamps you’re right did start in all the major metros had their own coding bootcamps.

     

                                     We see people who are more about 21 to about 25. So it’s individuals that have some type of life experience, maybe they’ve worked a little bit, maybe they did some community college, or maybe they got a degree that didn’t allow them to really participate in the economy in a meaningful way. So we’ve met so many music majors, so many psychology majors, even people who have you know a general business degree you know might have a hard time finding their footing in the economy.

     

                                     So we find that people who have some type of life experience, whether you’ve worked in retail and now are a little more mature you know and you’re really thinking about,” Okay, I want a career that’s going to offer me a lot of opportunities,” those are really the people that we’ve seen across the country decide to participate in the coding bootcamp. I would venture to guess that it’s the space that’s a little more mature, it might move a little bit younger, but right now we haven’t seen a massive demand from the 18- or 19-year-olds.

     

    O’Hanlon:   Okay. So I know when you got started it was really a focus on getting the underrepresented communities, the Latina community and you know just addressing a need that was going to exist in the LA area, but what, have, have you seen that demographic changing with your bootcamps as you’ve progressed? Has, has it been less about making sure that you know these traditionally underrepresented communities and, and, but it’s become more of a kind of a general population that have been attending the bootcamps?

     

    Monge:       Yes, definitely. So we did see that big shift and especially you know in 2020 when COVID hit Sabio had to go into a hundred present live remote environment, right? So starting in April and May we really were able enroll a person who was in Texas, a person who was in Chicago, because all you needed was your laptop and strong access to the internet. So we have seen that the demographics of our coding bootcamp have become you know they’re very diverse. Where we will have you know Latinos, African Americans, we have a massive women in tech scholarship, we do a lot to try to encourage ladies to come to the program and support them post-graduation.

     

                                     But one of the things that we weren’t aware of when we started was that there’s actually a large military veteran population that is very well suited for coding. That we discovered maybe two or three years into the coding bootcamp. So now a good percentage of the people in the program are military veterans. So we’ll have people who actually live around the world, because veterans I don’t know have seen the world and they, they discover beautiful parts. And so it’s become a really diverse community in a unique way that we weren’t really anticipating.

     

                                     But what we want is basically our training room to look like America, right? An America super diverse, super fantastic and that’s who should be participating in the innovation economy. We think everyone should give it a consideration, give it thought, try it a little bit and decide for themselves if it’s something that they want to do professionally.

     

    O’Hanlon:   I, I think – I love that, I think that’s, that’s amazing that you guys are doing that. It’s interesting to think about. I, I have a 12-year-old son and you know he codes every day and he doesn’t even realize that he’s coding it, that he’s doing coding. We’re, you know I’m in awe of what he’s able to do on, on a regular basis. It’s not anything – I mean obviously I could learn how to code at some point, but I think we’re gonna, we’re, we’re kind of reaching this, this point in time where it’s not really going to be a question of, “Do you want to learn how to code,” it’s just you know you’re gonna learn how to code, it’s going to be kind of ingrained like you know like math or English or anything like that.

     

    Monge:       Right.

     

    O’Hanlon:   It’s just going to be part of, you know part of our everyday lives.

     

                                     So do you, do you foresee in the future that you might see kind of a shift in the, in people’s attitude regarding coding and, and you know and then you know maybe have as a result maybe your curriculum is going to be shifting into maybe other areas?

     

    Monge:       Yeah, so I think there’s opportunities on both sides. I mean we’ve seen that you know there’s been a national movement for Hour of Code, right?

     

    O’Hanlon:   Mm-hmm.

     

    Monge:       So in December during Computer Science Week most elementary kids will sit down and actively say like, “I am coding today.” So they’re developing the digital proficiency from an early age, which is fantastic.

     

                                     There are also a lot of after-school curricular activities that are related to coding and robotics. So I think that there has to be like you said a general understanding of what code is, how it operates, have some kind of fluency in it.

     

                                     There are also a lot of tools that help people do low-code automation, right? So there’s that development. But then there’s the development on the other side of the dumbbell which is you’re going to have a lot of AI and machine learning. We’re doing a lot of stuff with autonomous vehicles. I think I’ve seen that they, they showcased the tractor that’s a hundred percent autonomous, right? That the farmer’s controlling just with his phone.

     

    O’Hanlon:   Mm-hmm.

     

    Monge:       So I think there’s really exciting things that are happening across the spectrum, the technical spectrum and so it is going to become more incumbent for people to have some type of digital literacy and I think it just depends on how much…

     

                                     Right, like you and I probably I don’t know how much – like I never finished calculus, I could, I tried it, I could never get there.

     

    O’Hanlon:   [Laughs]

     

    Monge:       And now as an adult running a business I’m like, “What even is it,” right? Like do, who really needs it?

     

    O’Hanlon:   Right, right,

     

    Monge:       Versus, “I need algebra,” you need spreadsheets, you need concepts of finance. So I think it’s going to be something similar. There’s going to be a big spectrum. Does that make sense? Did I answer that?

     

    O’Hanlon:   Yeah, no, no, it, it makes, it makes total sense. You know you brought up AI and machine learning and other areas where we’re going to be heading.

     

                                     You know I was just talking to somebody earlier today about the metaverse and, and you know now that, now that we’ve got these entire you know universes that are being constructed virtually and people can actually interact and, and it’s nothing like Second Life. You know if anybody remembers Second Life 20 years ago people thought that that was going to be the next big thing and that was a big bust. But you know the metaverse and, and now companies are, are talking about using holograms to, to have you know interactions with other people.

     

    Monge:       Yeah.

     

    O’Hanlon:   There’s so many things that are going to be coming that, that just are kind of mind blowing. That we are going to need this next generation of you know the kids today who they are the next generation of coders and they’re the ones who are going to create these new universes for us and all these technologies and capabilities. So I think it’s really, really amazing that, that they’re getting this foundation now so that they can start kind of… They don’t have to think about the actual idea of coding, you know getting over that hurdle, they can just think about all of the possibilities that are, that are open to them and that they can provide to, to, to their customers in the future. So good stuff there.

     

                                     I love the idea that you know we’ve got, we’ve got these coding camps that do really give a nice foundational base to anybody and that’s, that’s an important thing. And anything that we can do to, to really blur the lines between equity and parity when it comes to underrepresented populations in technology I think is a really, really good thing.

     

                                     So Liliana I do want to thank you very much for what you guys are doing. I think it’s a great thing.

     

                                     If folks are interested in finding out more about the Sabio Bootcamps how can they get it? Do you have a website you want to point them to?

     

    Monge:       Yes, certainly. So it’s just our name: S-A-B-I-O-.L-A, because we started in Los Angeles. If you go to the website you’re going to find a bunch of different resources. We have a lot of introductory courses that are absolutely free, so that people can dip their toe in the water and say, “Okay, is this something that might interest me?”

     

                                     From what I’ve learned a lot of people really describe getting a little bug when they wrote something and something happens and they’re just like, “Oh wow.”

     

                                     But I think a lot of people are you know we’re, we’re makers, right? We, we evolve to work with our hands, to have tools and to build things, so this is one of those ways that we can really be creative and build something that other people can use or maybe you just build a solution for yourself that you really need, that no one else has built.

     

    O’Hanlon:   All right, well that’s, that’s such great stuff. I do appreciate it. Again, thanks for joining me today on TechStrong TV. Liliana thanks again for your time.

     

    Monge:       Thank you for having me.

     

    O’Hanlon:   All right everybody please stick around we’ve got lots more TechStrong TV coming up, so stay tuned.

     

    [End of Audio]

     

  • The Benefits of Crowdsourced Testing

    The Benefits of Crowdsourced Testing

    Charlene O’Hanlon and Rob Mason from Applause talk about how crowdsourced testing is a highly effective method for testing applications and its benefits to DevOps teams. The video is below followed by a transcript of the conversation.

    O’Hanlon: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to TechStrong TV. I’m O’Hanlon, and I’m here now with Mason with Applause. Rob is a return to TechStrong TV. Rob, welcome back. So good to see you again.

    Mason: Thank you, and thanks for having me on again.

    O’Hanlon: All right, so we had a great conversation, what was it, a couple of months ago?

    Mason: Yeah, a little while ago.

    O’Hanlon: I think so. Yeah, yeah, so time flies when you’re having fun, I guess. But, at that point, I did invite you to come back on so we could talk about the topic of continuous testing, which I think is something that is gaining a lot of traction in the DevOps space, and it’s certainly garnering a lot of conversation. Sorry, not continuous testing, crowdsource testing. Oh my goodness, my brain this afternoon, what am I going to do? Sorry about that. Yes, crowdsource testing, and it, too, is something that a lot of DevOps teams or a lot of organizations are considering as an alternative, I guess, or maybe a complement to the way that they’re doing testing these days. You are the expert in the field, so I want to talk to you about it and kind of get a download, if you will, on crowdsource testing. What you’re seeing in the space right now, who’s talking about it and what organizations, how they could benefit from it?

    Mason: Right. Thank you. Yeah, so Applause is the largest crowdsource testing company in the world. _____ [inaudible due to audio distortion] quality testing for some of the largest companies in the world, like Google, PayPal, Walmart, Amazon, Facebook, a lot of those different types of companies, and we do that digital quality testing by using a crowd. Applause actually started off as uTest about a decade ago, _____ the name uTest, so anyone could test. Basically, if you go to uTest.com, you sign up to become a tester. Today, that community is over 750,000 people from 233 different countries around the world, and they’re making money from testing products from the company, or the companies I mentioned before, as independent contractors. They bring their own computers, they decide what they work on, what they don’t work on, they bring their gear, they decide when they want to work.

    You start off by going to uTest.com, you sign up, and then we put you through all sorts of training. We have what we call uTest Academy, lots of great videos, training courses. It’s all free. You don’t have to pay anything for it. Joining the community is free. Once you join the community, you start to level up your skills as a tester, and you become better and better at writing great bug reports, with _____ the attachments, the steps to reproduce them, learn now to execute test cases, how to do payment testing or accessibility testing. We train you on all sorts of things around testing because we know there are not enough tests going on. We know there is not enough quality in our products today. It could always be better, and so ‒

    O’Hanlon: Yeah ‒

    Mason: Go ahead.

    O’Hanlon: No, no, you go ahead.

    Mason: I mean, with how fast the technology landscape is changing, you guys see it firsthand every day, it’s very easy to switch from one bank to another or from one app to another, and so it’s very important that that first experience is first class. More and more big brands are very much aware and very in tune with those first experiences and the ongoing experience of their users, so we use a very large community of real people in the real world, around the world, every country you can imagine. You know, 233 countries, as I mentioned. They level up over time to become more and more expertise. As they progress in their learning and participation, they get invited into more projects, so they get opened up to more ability to earn money, basically. When they tell us ‒ voluntarily, of course ‒ about themselves more, what devices they have, do they have an iOS device, android device, what kind of laptop they have, they get invited to more projects.

    The more they tell us, the more that we can match them to projects. We use machine learning algorithms to match testers to projects based on past experience, so we’ve got a data science team, and machine learning algorithms that match based on performance. It’s not based on demographics or race or ethnicity, it’s all based on what you can do, and what you can do is behind a screen. The machines don’t know. It’s based on did you turn up on time for the project, did you execute ‒

    O’Hanlon: Yeah.

    Mason: ‒ _____ well, were your bugs well written? It’s all based on pure scoring, which is great. Some of our projects do require physical presence, it will be like a test for Starbucks, and you have to go in and buy a coffee and prove that you can order it online and pick it up, and all that sort of stuff. But, most of them are remote, and you can work wherever you are, from your couch with your dog sitting on your lap, and still execute great testing for the customers. That’s what the community is really a lot like. Some of the projects do have demographic requirements, but mostly those are in the medical space or in fitness. For instance, we’ll be looking for a specific age class for testing online fitness classes for some of our customers, and so sometimes there are demographic requirements. But, for the most part, it’s pretty wide open for anyone to participate. What’s nice is in some of these communities, or sorry, in some of these countries, it’s hard to find jobs. Especially during COVID, we had about 50,000 coming in per month during COVID.

    O’Hanlon: Wow.

    Mason: That’s trailing off now with less people coming in, but with all the people that were out of work, you can make money at Applause. Some people do it as a moonlighting job on the side, just to earn some extra money, maybe some play money. Some people make a living out of it. As an independent contractor, again, they make their own time and everything, but they’re making a living off of Applause doing testing for these customers full time. Again, anyone can do it, so if you’re in a country where maybe women can’t get jobs because it’s old-school and it’s sexist there in that country or what have you, or you’re in a demographic that it’s harder to find work, uTest doesn’t care, like bring your skills, bring your abilities, and anyone can get work. If you look at our community, we’re incredibly diverse across, again, all those countries, but also in our global community, we have a high ratio of women in the community.

    Not everyone, obviously, tells us what gender they are, but 35 percent of our global community are female. We have top-rated testers in the community, 41 percent of our gold-rated testers, that’s the highest level tester we have, 41 percent of those are women, 40 percent of our silver testers are women, 40 percent of our bronze testers are women, so you can just see that across the board it’s, again, based on performance. It has nothing to do with gender or anything else, which just levels the playing field for a global economy, and for global testing of enterprise products. I’m sorry. I’ve been talking ‒

    O’Hanlon: No, that’s awesome. I love to get the download, so it’s like you kind of take it from there and just run with it. Wow. That’s really cool stuff. I think that the last time we spoke, you guys were working on a couple really cool projects, but it seems to me that this would be a great technology, or a great service, if you will, for organizations that really don’t have maybe an in-house testing environment, or maybe organizations that do have an in-house testing environment but really kind of want to go that extra mile and make sure really that all their bases are being covered. How much of your customer base, then, are those companies that maybe already have testing abilities in house but they’re just looking to kind of up their game, if you know what I mean?

    Mason: I would say probably almost all of them have QA ‒

    O’Hanlon: Really?

    Mason: ‒ of some sort, but the difference is QA in a lab with a relatively small team is very different than real world QA. If you have some simulators or some real devices in the lab, some browsers based in your lab, it’s very different than browsers around the world. Probably a lot of the enterprise companies have their sites localized into different languages. Probably in your lab in your local team, you may not have all those native language speakers, so that’s _____, so localization is one. Currency testing, payment instrument testing, all those things that happen in the real world, you know, poor networks, flaky networks, different flavors of Samsung devices or android pixels, all that sort of stuff. A lab test is great, and it’s a great way to make sure the base foundations of your applications are good on your mobile apps, but it’s very different when you get out in the real world, and that’s where the customers judge you.

    They don’t judge you for your lab experiences, they judge you when you get out in the real world, that’s important. Almost all of our enterprise customers have their own QA teams, but they admit, and these are big companies ‒ it’s Google, it’s Amazon, it’s Facebook ‒ they admit that they don’t have a big enough team, even at their size, to cover what they really need to do to test their applications. You need a company that can bring resources from around the world, speaking all the different languages, all the different currencies, all the different types of devices. I think the last time we counted, there were about four million different devices in the hands of this community, because everyone ‒

    O’Hanlon: Wow.

    Mason: ‒ has got a phone _____ [inaudible due to audio distortion], what have you, so you take all those devices and you bring them to bear on some of these huge problems of the large enterprise, and it changes the dynamics. It’s daunting if you want to build a product and launch it globally and have it be successful, and not know that it’s going to work the first time. Even if you get a great, large outsourcing firm based in India or over in Europe, they’re based in one area, in one region. They all speak probably the same language, a very similar language, they’re in the same area, the same currency. How do you get that global test? The answer is crowdsource testing. There is no other way to do it. It’s just not practical any other way. If you have to manage those masses of people, like how do you make sure that it’s not just total chaos, and that’s what Applause has really specialized in for more than a decade, is making sure that we give great quality in what we give back to our customers, it’s actionable, it’s precise. Every bug report from us has to have an attachment and a video, it has to have reproduction steps.

    Again, we don’t just do bugs for customers, we do all sorts of testing, like we test smart phones, we test smart TVs, smart cars, IoT, AR/VR. We do machine language, data collection, data collection from machine learning ‒ I said machine language, but machine learning ‒ so all sorts of things we do for our customers using this global community. When you think about it, I have 750,000 people I can bring to bear on your problems to improve the digital quality of your applications. Sometimes you need more data, sometimes you need _____ [inaudible due to audio distortion], sometimes you just need a lot of people to bang on a website, sometimes you need people to go deep and look for those hard-to-find bugs. It varies greatly, so we cover pretty much every area that you could expect of digital quality testing with that crowd, and we _____ [inaudible due to audio distortion] so you don’t have to think about it. That just allows us to scale, but what we’re really proud of is just how successful our community has been, how diverse they are, how broad and how deep they get.

    They are true experts, and a lot of these people in the community, some of them are just people moonlighting after working some other kind of job, but some are true QA experts that have been in the industry for decades and have just chosen this new way of life, because it’s flexible. You always work at home, or wherever _____ [inaudible due to audio distortion]. You can be on the beach and doing the job. It doesn’t matter to us, as long as the job gets done. It is the new world, and as COVID removed some jobs for some people, at least temporarily, we got an influx, but also people are now looking for that new way of working. We see the industry moving out of the offices, and that’s what we’ve been at Applause for a decade. Our community, the people doing the testing for us, have been outside of offices since we started, and so it is the natural way for us. It’s like welcome to our party, but now you have to figure out how to work ‒

    O’Hanlon: Right.

    Mason: ‒ _____ [inaudible due to audio distortion], and we’ve been doing that _____ for a long time.

    O’Hanlon: That’s very cool. On average, how many testers do you have on a particular project?

    Mason: It varies greatly, like sometimes we’re doing a global payment instrument test that’s making sure something like an android pay or an Apple pay works across the globe when they’re rolling out a new feature. There, we have to engage a lot of people to do that, to make sure that all the different banks, all the different currencies work around the world. Sometimes, it’s a point release, a patch release from a customer with a new version of their mobile app, they made some targeted changes, they’ve told us what they are, some regression testing around the area, a specific testing in that area, so it’s a smaller team, so anywhere from a handful of people to thousands of people at times. We don’t generally go much larger than thousands on a single project unless there is a very specific need. We do have some that spike up there in very large numbers, but, for the most part, we’re in the tens to hundreds range, less so in the thousands on a given, specific, what we call test cycle.

    For most of our customers, in fact all of our customers, it is subscription-based at this point, so they’ll sign up and have us test a digital asset over a long period of time, and so those assets go through their cycles. The first release is different from a patch release versus a new, major update, a new, major feature. Again, the size of those teams vary over time, and we can pull as many as we need into it. If there are different skill sets, like maybe a customer has a mobile app and now they’re focused on accessibility, and so they’re going to do a release 100 percent focused on making their application more accessible, we’ll bring in an accessibility group from our community and have them focus on accessibility. These are people not only that know accessibility testing well, but they’re people with real accessibility limitations, so it’s real people with real disabilities testing your application to make sure it works in the real world, because there is nothing more frustrating than trying to use an application that claims it supports you and then finding out it doesn’t.

    O’Hanlon: Right, right. Well, it sounds like great stuff, and you guys have been doing this for ten years or so?

    Mason: Yeah, just over 11, coming on 12 now.

    O’Hanlon: That’s great. How did you guys come up with this idea? I mean, I think it’s really kind of fascinating because it really does address a real problem that is in the industry, and that is being able to test all the things, if you know what I mean. Is this something that your founders just decided one day like, “Well, you know what? The best way to do it is let’s just ask everybody to do it, and everybody to help us out.”

    Mason: Yeah, our founders were engineering managers from the past, they were engineers, and they had the experience of building and testing applications in their own labs, and then going out in the real world and finding out that things were different when they got out to the real world. They said, “We have to change the model. The model isn’t going to work, and it’s only getting worse over time.” They said, “We have to go and turn this model upside down,” and they were far ahead of their time when they launched the company. Now there are some other much smaller companies out there doing some similar things, but they’re much more niche. But, they saw what was coming. The real world matters, and the differences are just ballooning and you just cannot keep up, even as a large company in the lab, so great foresight there. It took a lot of work to get to the point where you can manage that many people and have it be successful.

    Obviously, if you just put random people on a project and say, “We’ll do stuff for you,” you’re going to get terrible results and just waste your time. Obviously, places like Walmart and Facebook and others like that will not tolerate that, so you have to have a very good system and process around it. We have a special enterprise grade platform that our customers and community interface on, so we do software development to make our own platforms to allow those groups to interact with each other, and then we’ve got a great team of community management around them, recruiting people, training them, helping them learn how to be great testers. Ultimately, we’re making careers for people. We’re helping people make livings working for themselves wherever they want to be.

    O’Hanlon: That’s great, and we’re going to need to wrap this up here very soon, but have you heard of any stories of folks that joined the platform to do testing here and there, and ultimately decided that, “Hey, this is what I want to do for a living. This is what I want to do all the time,” and they ended up actually doing a career change because of this?

    Mason: Absolutely. In fact, we’ve hired several of those.

    O’Hanlon: Oh, really?

    Mason: It’s not generally the model, to hire from the community, because the community is our model, but sometimes they rise up so far and they’re such stars in the community, and we’re looking for additional help in managing the community, or elsewhere in our business, that we find them and bring them in. A lot of our great employees we have at the company are people that we found through the community, because they’ve come in and shown what they can do. There are others that have gone off and moved on to full-time positions in companies. Some of them do have full-time QA positions, and then work for us moonlighting. Some of them, like my daughter is in the community, anyone can be in the community. My daughter is in the community, and she makes a few bucks on the side and buys herself snacks or whatever _____.

    So, it really is a very diverse community of everyone who is just getting started or learning about testing, giving an appreciation for what it takes to make digital quality products, and what companies go through to test them, so I think it’s a great experience for everyone. I encourage every single person to sign up at uTest.com. Again, it’s free. We pay you, not the opposite, so you can make money. All you have to do is experience some digital quality products, give us good feedback, and help us make these products better for the planet, basically.

    O’Hanlon: That’s awesome. Well, Rob, thank you so much for walking me through this. I love the idea of pretty much crowdsourcing anything, because I truly believe in the collective intelligence of the populations. Anything that we can do to kind of encourage that and really take advantage of that at the end of the day, really capitalize on that collective intelligence and the ability of crowds to really do some good, I think is good for everybody. Thank you, again, and it was great having you on TechStrong TV again, and hopefully we’ll see you again in the future.

    Mason: My pleasure. It was great talking to you.

    O’Hanlon: All right, everybody, please stick around. We’ve got lots more TechStrong TV coming up, so stay tuned.

    [End of Audio]

  • Will Devs Return to the Office?

    Will Devs Return to the Office?

    Charlene O’Hanlon and Michael Davis, CRO at Rollbar, discuss findings from a recent developer survey exploring how devs feel about the return to the workplace. The video is below, followed by a transcript of the conversation.

    Announcer: This is Digital Anarchist.

    Charlene O’Hanlon: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to TechStrong TV. I’m Charlene O’Hanlon, and I’m here now with Michael Davis, who is the CRO at Rollbar. Michael, thank you so much for joining me. I appreciate it.

    Michael Davis: Thank you, Charlene. Great to be here.

    O’Hanlon: Well it’s great to have you here. I am really fascinated about a recent developer survey that you guys came out with regarding their attitudes toward going back into the office, and that’s always a hot topic among organizations no matter what they do. A lot of companies are grappling with just the aftermath, if you will, of the pandemic and the return to the workplace. If you rewind about 12 months ago, we were hearing stories about companies deciding that they were never going to have their employees come back and they were going to work remotely 100 percent all the time.

    And a lot of organizations, or a lot of employees I should say, kind of took those cues and decided that they just were going to go and move wherever they wanted to. And so now a year later companies are saying, “Well maybe we should come back into the office at least part time.”

    Davis: Yeah. Right.

    O’Hanlon: So there have been a lot of kind of ping-ponging I guess, for lack of a better term, and I truly believe that the rest of this year there’s going to be a lot of fallout from organizations dealing with employees who are no longer able to come into the office because of their location. But I’m interested in finding out what you guys found in your survey regarding that and some of the other findings that maybe surprised you.

    Davis: Yeah. That’s a great intro, although I might push us back even before COVID. I think this is especially relevant for a lot of the software development teams that we work with. If you go back before COVID, we had customers where their entire teams of developers didn’t even own a laptop. They were literally in the office all the time, every day. And so not only are companies now wrestling with this transition post COVID, but they had a huge transition they went through pre COVID, right? And that certainly put a lot of stress and strain on the companies, but more importantly on the actual developers themselves.

    And so here we are now coming to the end of this, as you’re describing, and we’re going through another transition. And I agree, I think what the survey starts to show is that this is not going to be black or white type of thing. It’s not going to be all of one or the other for many of the reasons you already mentioned. The survey was very clear in that first off it said 77 percent of developers were definitely significantly impacted by COVID and what this meant for them, and now as you start to interview folks and do the surveys you find that it’s a real mixed bag. You have folks who’ve enjoyed the freedom, enjoyed that flexibility, and have started to adjust to that to some extent.

    But I think one of the most interesting findings is that they’re missing that face-to-face component of their work. And if you think about developers and what they do, this is a team sport, right?

    O’Hanlon: Right, right.

    Davis: They’re really missing that day-to-day, face-to-face interaction, and especially given the sort of raised stakes, which is another thing that came out of this survey. What we found was sort of this external pressure on development was even raised higher. Why? Well, because customers are needing to interact with companies through software. So there’s even more pressure on building more software faster. So these are some interesting things that we saw sort of pulling against each other.

    O’Hanlon: So what do you think is the answer here? I understand that developers crave that face-to-face. I also see people who are now dealing with a level of social anxiety that maybe they never had dealt with before in their life. If you’re a year away from somebody or large groups of people it can be tough to reintegrate yourself into that environment. And as much as we all say I can’t wait for things to get back the way that they used to, we can go to concerts, we can go shopping and not have to worry about wearing a mask or whatever, you put people in some of these situations and it’s difficult for them. Some more than others.

    Some are just like, yeah, whatever, you know, let’s just go back and it’ll be fine the way that it was. But I’m not sure when people say I want to work with all these people, I want to get back into the scrum, I want to do this and do that, I’m just not sure when they actually do it that that’s really what they wanted. Do you think that there’s going to be maybe buyer’s remorse if you know what I mean?

    Davis: Yeah, there could be. My guess – and again, it’s based on some of the survey data we’re seeing – you do have this mixed feeling about your sort of life balance isn’t necessarily all you thought it would be by being home all the time. But I think you’re going to see the same thing. If we went back full time in the office people would be feeling that same kind of pressure around the commute and the things that go with that. So my gut says that now that companies have adjusted and people have adjusted more to being away, we’re going to see this hybrid environment.

    You’re going to see more of an environment where people are going to be in the office at certain times, but they’re going to have the ability to work from home at certain times, which again, carries its own set of things. We’ve seen lots of investment in tools, Zoom being one of them we’re on right now, but there’s a long way to go. Because the other thing the survey showed was that by having these distances it’s harder to get those answers, let’s say, as a developer that you might need in the moment. When someone’s not two cubicles away from you, you have to hope that they’re on Slack. And if they’re not, then you’ve got a delay and a problem.

    So I think the next thing we’re seeing is we’re seeing more investment in additional tools, in additional types of processes that help this hybrid environment more.

    O’Hanlon: Do you think that we’re going to see an increase in these distributed workforces on a full-time basis either as a direct result of the mass exodus during the pandemic or just because they can, that they’re recognizing that maybe we don’t have to be in the office all the time? Or Joe left and he can do it full time, so I’m going to do the same thing and what are they going to do?

    Davis: Right.[Laughs]

    O’Hanlon: Take away my birthday? It’s going to be one of these – I think there’s going to be this push-pull. And so I’m wondering do you agree with me? Is this something that very might happen? And what do you kind of see? How can organizations – how do you expect them to react to that?

    Davis: Yeah. And I would add to the points you made one other thing, which is companies I think have learned that once you remove this need for everyone to be in the office all the time this also starts to free up your ability to recruit more broadly and it gives you flexibility to bring on the type of people you want wherever they sit, right?

    O’Hanlon: Right.

    Davis: So I think that’s going to play in as well, and that’s why I think it really will be this hybrid environment. So what can they do about it? Well, they’ve got to be really mindful about how people work and they’ve got to be investing. Companies have to be investing in the right kind of tools. I’ll toot our horn a little bit here. Rollbar is about this sort of platform that gives you visibility across your teams on specific errors that you have in your code.

    That’s one example. If companies have tools like that in place, now you don’t have to be sitting two cubicles away. You’ve got the data you need right in front of you, real time, to be able to make those kind of decisions. That’s one example. There’s many, many more, but it’s going to be thinking about these workflows somewhat differently and making sure you have the right processes and data so people can operate more efficiently.

    O’Hanlon: Yeah. It’s going to be an interesting year I think as we do kind of transition back to life post COVID or even the final throes of COVID, because so much happened over the last 12 years and it was a lot for all of us to process. And now for us to kind of quote/unquote go back to the way things were I just don’t think it’s ever going to happen. I don’t think that we’re ever going to be back the way things were before COVID, and so that means a lot of changes within organizations and among employees and their understanding of work and how they approach it on a day-to-day basis. I think there’s going to have to be a lot of giving in, if you will for companies, that they’re going to have to take a brand new tack when it comes to hiring and retaining their employees.

    But employees also need to kind of understand that at the end of the day there’s a job that needs to be done and sometimes the best way to go about doing that job is to maybe be in the office or be face to face. So there is no one-size-fits-all solution here. Michael, great results. Were there any other things that popped out of the survey regarding developers and how they view work or work/life balance or salary or anything like that that you guys covered in this survey?

    Davis: We didn’t really touch on salary so much. I think the big takeaway points were just how pervasive the impact was on developers and what they were trying to do. That was the first thing. The second thing then was this notion that a lot of that sort of stress and strain that was associated with this was, one, just a normal transition, but also this higher demand for software, which I don’t think necessarily any of us really predicted, and that is added to what’s already software in the world. Every company is a software company kind of thing, right? So that’s the challenge, and that’s the challenge that Rollbar and other companies are working to help this community with, because it’s tough. It’s a tough job.

    O’Hanlon: Yeah. And to your point, I don’t think anybody expected it, but do you think that it’s going to be sustainable? I mean, is this something that’s going to be kind of the new normal, if you will? At least not may necessarily from a product – well, even from a productivity standpoint, but do you think the demand is going to remain as high as it has been over the last 18 months or so?

    Davis: I just have no doubt about that. I mean, there was already an incredible pressure on the system. These teams are already feeling lots of external pressure about being able to deliver features and functionality faster, right? We’re all hearing about iteration speed. And so I don’t have any question now that – again, I think companies have learned that maybe they don’t need the same kind of retail presence to serve their customer base. Which again, puts just more pressure on the need for software.

    So yeah, this all feeds into I think even a more challenging environment, but certainly a rewarding environment because these people are at the center of the epicenter right now of everything.

    O’Hanlon: Yeah. But I do worry about burnout. I do worry about the fact that – I think a lot of people really rose to the occasion at the beginning of the pandemic and all throughout it because they did recognize that there was a value to it. They could actually see how their work was impacting their company. And I’m not sure that once we go back to kind of whatever, whatever we’re going to call it, that that is going to sustain, and it’s really going to give developers and other employees for that matter kind of the push that they need. And it does concern me that we may very well see mass burnout among developers, and that could be bad for everybody.

    Davis: You’ve given me a great transition to one thing I wanted to mention, which is the next thing we’re going to be working on is some analysis around developer productivity. So I think you’re right on, spot on. I think that’s the next concern. I mean, it’s already a concern, but now it’s even more accentuated. DevOps was already a mixed bag in terms of developer productivity. I won’t spill anything, but we’re going to do a deep dive there and hopefully we’ll have some more great data for you.

    O’Hanlon: Well, come back and have the conversation with me when that’s ready, because I would love to continue this conversation. There’s a lot going on in the space right now and it’s got so much more to do with just business, the business side of things. There’s a real human element to all of this and I think it’s very important that organizations keep that in mind at the end of the day and so much more. But Michael, thanks for talking to me about this survey and the results of this one.

    Fascinating stuff, and it’ll be interesting to see how the rest of the year plays out in terms of everything that we’ve discussed today. So thanks again for your time. I appreciate you being here.

    Davis: Thank you. Thanks for the chance to talk to you. Bye-bye.

    O’Hanlon: Alright. Alright, everybody. Please stick around. We’ve got lots more TechStrong TV coming up, so stay tuned.

    [End of Audio]

  • Using Data Fabric for Real-Time Processing

    Using Data Fabric for Real-Time Processing

    Charlene O’Hanlon and Scott Gnau from InterSystems talk about silos in organizations and how data fabric enables organizations to process, transform, secure and orchestrate data from disparate sources in real-time. The video is below followed by a transcript of the conversation.

    Announcer: This is Digital Anarchist.

    O’Hanlon: Hey, everybody, welcome back to Tech Strong TV. I’m Charlene O’Hanlon, and I’m here now with Scott Gnau, who is the VP of Data Platforms at InterSystems. Scott, thank you so much for taking the time and getting on the call with me, I really appreciate it.

    Gnau: And likewise—thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.

    O’Hanlon: Alright. So, tell me a little bit about InterSystems.

    Gnau: InterSystems is a creative data technology company, we’re based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We’ve been around for about 40 years, and we actually build data integration, data platform technology that’s used by a lot of very sophisticated applications around the world—in fact, more than half of medical records in North America go through our systems, 15 percent of global equity trades touch an InterSystems data platform or interface along the way.

    So, we’re known for solving very large, complicated, business critical problems that are centered around data.

    O’Hanlon: Well, data is the new oil, right, is that what I’ve heard? Time and time again, so many companies now rely on the data to make their business decisions and find areas of opportunity and so much more just, you know, ways to do their business better. So, data—you guys are definitely in the right space, for sure.

    Gnau: Absolutely.

    O’Hanlon: [Laughter] So, let’s talk a little bit about, then, the issue of silos when we’re talking about data and access to data, especially when we’re talking about things such as customer experience or uncovering those opportunities within the business, whether it’s improving internal processes or external applications and issues and things that do touch end users.

    So, we’ve been talking for a long time about breaking down silos when it comes to data, but do you think that that’s something that’s feasible or do you think that it’s kind of one of those wishes that will never really come true?

    Gnau: [Laughter] I’ve kind of given up on the breaking down the silos, and I’ll back into that with, you know, I’ll hit on a couple of things that you said. Because I think some of the things you said are actually really, extremely relevant, right? Data being the new oil and, you know, people have been saying that, and it’s absolutely the case. If you look at the wealth that was created in the 18th Century, it was railroads, and if you look at the wealth that was created in the 20th Century, it was energy and oil, right? Look at the wealth that’s been created in the last 20 years. It’s all about data centric kinds of companies, right?

    O’Hanlon: Right.

    Gnau: And that’s a really cool thing. And the difference really is, you know, companies can leverage that data not only to understand their business and have a rearview mirror view of what happened in the business and be able to make better decisions about it, but actually synthesize that data into building new businesses for themselves and new ways to interact with customers and so on. So, it’s absolutely critical and important.

    And sadly, I’ve been in industry, I guess, about 35 years. It feels like just five, but a long time. And throughout that career, we’ve been talking about how do we break down silos in data and silos in data processing? And, you know, silos crepe up for many different reasons. They can creep up because you’ve deployed an application that’s very specialized to go solve a problem that’s extremely important and the data that gets collected is kind of in that application and not shared easily, and that becomes, eventually, a silo in and of itself.

    Certainly, there are business model and political silos that get created, right? I’ve got a business unit model and the mortgage folks don’t wanna talk to the consumer lending folks don’t wanna talk to the deposit folks and so on. And it’s also very easy for silos to build up because of geographic differences in the business, right?

    O’Hanlon: Mm-hmm.

    Gnau: And so, this has been going on for a long time, and for a long time, we in technology have tried to solve and advise our clients, “Hey, don’t let silos control you.”

    O’Hanlon: Right.

    Gnau: I would say that the problem of silos and how they come up has actually gotten larger and is increasing at almost an unimaginable pace. Certainly, with the advent of the cloud and microservices and easy to spin up applications, more and more silos can come up very, very quickly. The fact that data and relevant data, the oil of our businesses used to be created inside the business, inside the firewall by our application, so we actually had some semblance of control over it. Now, a lot of the data that we need to use, understand, consume, and drive decisions from may live its entire life cycle outside the firewall of our business and out of our control.

    So, you think about one of the drivers of silos, and it just has now gone kind of exponentially very different.

    O’Hanlon: Mm-hmm.

    Gnau: Certainly, the pandemic has created more geographic silos, but also, the need to be able to deploy data and decision making very quickly as many of us have been remanded to our home offices and trying to manage customer relationships and run our businesses remotely in a new and a different way.

    So, I think kind of the drive for silos is going to continue to increase. And so, I think it’s also then unimaginable to think that we will live in a world without data silos. So, if that were the case, it’s kinda like, how do we come up with an approach that lets us leverage and build beyond that?

    O’Hanlon: Yeah. So, you know, it’s a very good point that you make, the fact that we’ve had so many silos, the number and the velocity of silos has increased multifold, I would imagine, since the onset of the pandemic. And with this remote and hybrid work environment that we’re now entering into, I don’t think those silos are gonna be going away.

    So, short of I don’t know what, short of whatever an organization needs to do to break down those silos, how can an organization work effectively to access that information and to get the information they need and really kind of make the most of it without being able to break down those silos? Is there a way that they can still utilize that information as effectively as they could if there was—you know, if everything was kinda linear and they could just kind of skip across the data meadow, if you will, and kinda pick the flowers as they went along? I don’t know where that analogy came from, but [Laughter].

    Gnau: Well, listen, it would be less interesting if it was equally kind of a serial thing when you go pick up those flowers.

    O’Hanlon: Right, right.

    Gnau: And certainly, we talk and work with our clients, really, about this concept that we call the data fabric and a lot of technology ins and outs and all that kinda stuff with data fabric, which we probably won’t get into a lot today, but it’s almost at a mindset. And the way I describe it, being a pilot myself, is—think about being able to have a control tower kind of impact to how you manage and integrate your silos.

    So, think about control towers in flight, right? What is the purposes of having control towers? Well, obviously, the mission is to provide safe flights. How do they do that? Well, they connect different kinds of data together and synthesize that data for decision making, right? They don’t consolidate it, they don’t fly the planes, necessarily, but they collect that data and then disseminate it in a way to kind of control and coordinate the flow.

    O’Hanlon: Right.

    Gnau: They also, it’s not a single point of contact kind of consolidation, right? There’s a control tower at every airport, right? And they connect to each other as well to manage traffic between their segments and sectors in that grid. And so, the notion of control tower is a way to think about, how do you apply that technologically speaking into thinking about your infrastructure more as a data fabric and the things that are necessary from a mindset—again, not a specific technology or a vendor, necessary—but just a mindset of how to manage through the notion of silos.

    And so, the first thing, really, is something that’s also kind of nontraditional in data processing, at least during my career, it’s all about connecting data and not consolidating data, right? And for many years, it was like, “How do I consolidate all this stuff into one place to make it more manageable to take cost out?” and all that kinda stuff. Again, in a cloud-centric world, almost unmanageable.

    O’Hanlon: Mm-hmm.

    Gnau: So, instead of thinking about consolidating it, really think about how do you connect the different data across different places? And that obviously becomes a key part of your data fabric—the connectivity, the pipes, and the widgets, and how they fit together. Connectivity isn’t enough without context.

    O’Hanlon: Mm-hmm.

    Gnau: So, data that’s created in the silo may have a certain context inside of the silo, but that context needs to be reflected externally just like the control tower needs to understand what kind of plane you’re flying, because they’ll understand the operating capacity of that plane—how fast does it go, how high can it go, and what are its maneuvering capabilities, right?

    Same kind of thing in a control tower kind of aspect to data fabric—connect the data and provide context for the data so that, as the data get connected, there’s some relevance to what is happening and something could actually be derived from it.

    O’Hanlon: That makes a whole lot of sense, and to your point, having the data remain kinda siloed and just being able to kinda select the data that you’re looking for, you know, that’s most relevant to you at that time, I imagine actually, is a little bit easier than kinda sifting through an entire haystack for one little needle. So, that’s a really interesting concept.

    Is this a technology that is currently being used within the data management space, the data science space?

    Gnau: You know, there are more and more people talking about it, and I’m sure there’s some folks that maybe have different words to describe it. We’re thinking, and some of the analysts that we work with as well, are talking about the data fabric. I’d say first and foremost, it’s a mentality, but like I said, connect, don’t consolidate. Provide the context. Have the control towers communicate amongst themselves so it’s not a single control tower but multiple different control towers for the context or the application that’s required and kinda think about the network effect of being able to build that out.

    Once you have that mentality, then it comes down to a checklist of, you know, certainly a list of what is the existing technology that we have and what is the existing technology that we use, how are the data created, how are the data stored—you know, kind of just a roadmap of what ya got. And then, think about the connectivity and the context provisioning that you want to create and look at other technologies that might need to be added to the mix to make that work in an end to end state.

    So, it’s a mindset first, and then it’s a collection of some technologies to enable that, and it’s a combination of the existing stuff that you’ve got, and certainly, an application that’s been deployed in a business-critical nature, you’re not gonna yank that out for some technology decision. So, again, it’s all about that connectivity and fitting it together and piecing it together.

    The other thing that most of the clients that we’re talking with about this are very pragmatic, it’s not a—like anything ever really should be, it’s not a 10-year plan, but it’s an, okay, how do I map this sector? How do I put a control tower at this airport and this airport and how do I leverage that, right? So, how do I go connect this silo and that silo, and then let’s go get the next silo and let’s go get the other business unit and figure out how to kinda build that out over time.

    And what’s really cool is, the value accelerates as you start to collect more of these things together. And, you know, you’ve got three or four and then you add the fifth one—the value doesn’t go up 20 percent, the value actually, of what you can do with that can go up dramatically, much higher, because of being able to understand all of the customer interaction points and create new programs, or leverage that data to actually go build a new line of business that your customers weren’t expecting.

    O’Hanlon: Mm-hmm. Right, right. Interesting. That’s really, really fascinating to me. Now, does this also kinda democratize the data? Does it enable other parts of an organization to access the value from a lot of this data by using this data fabric without the need for maybe a data scientist or somebody who’s a specialist in this in an organization?

    Gnau: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And again, it’s a mentality and needs to be kind of thought of with a design going in, right?

    O’Hanlon: Mm-hmm.

    Gnau: So—right, in today’s world, thinking about security and privacy on one plane and then democratization of data on the other plane, they’re almost kind of at odds. So, there needs to be some forethought that goes into what is appropriate for the appropriate eyeballs in these different spaces, and then again, making sure that the technology stack that’s been built out has the capability to deliver that. But certainly, companies that—in my experience, at last, companies that have the most success in kind of refining their oil, their data, are the ones who are actually getting data anywhere that the data need to be for a decision that’s local, right?

    So, you know, people talk about real time decisions and real time AI models and all that kinda stuff. All really compelling, all really valuable, but all completely worthless if you can’t leverage that to deliver a yes to a customer when the customer asks a question, right? And so, democratization and the architectural democratization of the data is an important key component to making your data fabric really successful and really showing up with a lot of value for the business.

    O’Hanlon: And I would imagine that AI, machine learning—you know, those technologies can actually add a whole lot to making this a much more intelligent way of gathering data as well.

    Gnau: Yeah, and it’s a symbiotic relationship, right? So, you know, machine learning and AI are all the rage and all really good stuff. A lot of the math behind it is not particularly new. What’s interesting is, the math behind it dictates that the more data you add to the model, the more accurate the prediction becomes, right? And that is very different than some of the previous kind of data mining and data science stuff that went on.

    And so—okay, that means you need lots of data. How do you get lots of data? Well, you don’t if it’s in a bunch of silos that don’t talk to each other with no context and no connectivity.

    O’Hanlon: Right.

    Gnau: So, I actually think they’re kind of symbiotic in that an effective data fabric could actually enhance the capabilities of your AI programs, and your AI programs can actually enhance the value of your data fabric in return.

    O’Hanlon: That’s really, really fascinating. [Laughter] I love this topic. I think this is definitely something that more organizations should be considering, because you know, especially if you think about just the sheer volume of data that’s out there and, I mean, really, what organization today is not basically putting their entire business on the shoulders of data without having that information that they need to make those business decisions to uncover those opportunities to just basically survive and thrive in today’s environment. I really—short of having that data, I just don’t know how organizations today can do it.

    So, I think anything that’s going to make it easier for them to uncover those areas of opportunity and find those nuggets of information that’s in all of that data, I think, is gonna be a huge, huge value add for organizations.

    Gnau: Yeah. I mean, and the last piece, really, of success for a data fabric and why I think data fabric is so important—I tried to come up with something that started with a C, because I said connect and then context. But the last one really is lineage, because lineage creates trust.

    O’Hanlon: Mm-hmm.

    Gnau: So, you know, it’s interesting, the other interesting thing about some of the AI models out there is that the answers they create are actually sometimes not intuitive.

    O’Hanlon: Right.

    Gnau: And as human beings going to execute these things, we’ve gotta really trust that the models and the data are effectively connected, so that we’re gonna risk our business on these decisions, right?

    O’Hanlon: Yep, yep.

    Gnau: And so, you know, connectivity, context, and ultimately lineage or trust of the data are kind of the three key components, again, of the mentality. Nothing to do with technology, but you’ve gotta kinda build in what’s your framework, what’s your appetite in your business for these pieces and then go look at the technology landscape to start building it out.

    O’Hanlon: That’s a very intelligent way of going about that, too, so—I love that. Scott, thank you so much for having the conversation with me about data fabrics. I know we’re gonna be hearing more about it in the future. I think it’s a great mindset and a great way to approach data access and data use in an organization. So, thanks again for your time and your expertise, I really do appreciate it.

    Gnau: Thank you.

    O’Hanlon: Yeah. Alright. Alright, everybody, please stick around, we’ve got lots more Tech Strong TV coming up, so stay tuned.

    [End of Audio]

  • DevOps for Customer Experience

    DevOps for Customer Experience

    Charlene O’Hanlon and Amy Hudson of Cyara discuss the concept of DevOps for customer experience, which takes DevOps methodology and focuses it on CX software. But there are pitfalls DevOps teams face when dealing with customer experience software. The video is below followed by a complete transcript of the conversation.

    Announcer: This is Digital Anarchist.

    O’Hanlon: Hey, everybody, welcome back to Tech Strong TV. I’m Charlene O’Hanlon, and I’m here now with Amy Hudson, who is the VP of Global Center of Excellence at Cyara. Amy, thank you so much for taking a couple minutes and talking with me today—I really appreciate it.

    Hudson: I’m happy to be here.

    O’Hanlon: Great, great. So, Amy, tell me a little bit about Cyara to start off.

    Hudson: Oh, absolutely. Cyara has been around for about 10 years at this point, but we really focus on what we call customer experience assurance. Companies spend a lot of money in designing the right customer experience and all the technology that supports it, and Cyara is in the business of making sure that you are getting the experience you’ve invested in. And if you are, how do we help you continue to innovate and double down? And if you’re not, how do we help you fix it very quickly so you can stay ahead?

    O’Hanlon: Alright. That sounds great, and I imagine your business has been booming over the last year or so, because customer really came to the forefront for a lot of organizations as they kinda had to double down on their digital transformation efforts just to stay alive over the pandemic, over the last year and a half or so. And some of them have done it really well and others have not done as well.

    So, what are you guys seeing in the market right now as far as customer is experience is going?

    Hudson: Yeah, no, that’s a great question, because it has changed a lot in the last year, with the pandemic. I mean, listen, customers have historically always been demanding, right? That’s in our nature as customers. But now, with their hands on the technology, customers have very high expectations right now. And switching costs are low. So, if a customer doesn’t get what they’re looking for out of an experience, you may lose them.

    And so, the importance of having a good customer experience and staying ahead of it is at an all-time high from our perspective.

    O’Hanlon: So, we’ve been, obviously, you know, through devopsy.kinsta.cloud, we focus on the benefits of going with a, kind of a DevOps methodology and mindset and culture shift and all that good stuff. And we’ve seen kind of that whole premise of DevOps kind of shifted to other parts of an organization as they recognize the benefits of kind of blending two different maybe mindsets and areas of an organization together to kind of streamline operations and actually build a better product in the long run.

    I imagine customer service is not—has not been left out of the conversation when we’re talking about organizations adopting those DevOps principles for customer experience.

    Hudson: Yeah, that’s right. It’s interesting. So, about four or five years ago at Cyara, we started seeing DevOps fold into the contact center/customer experience space, but it was a little bit more of a rarity then. DevOps hadn’t necessarily intersected with customer experience yet at that point, but over the last three couple years or so, we’ve really seen DevOps become much more commonplace in the customer experience space. Which I think is a good thing, because, exactly what I mentioned before—you need to stay ahead. You need to be able to innovate quickly for customer experience, and I think these companies are starting to see that.

    So, we’re starting to see DevOps adopted almost universally. Either somebody has started it or is halfway through or a little more mature, but it’s in the conversation with almost everybody we talk to these days in terms of customer experience.

    O’Hanlon: That’s great. That’s really great to hear, because there are certainly a lot of benefits to DevOps in the customer experience space, you know, not the least of which is being able to service the customer much more effectively and quickly.

    But it’s not kind of a one to one adjustment, though. You know, it seems like, especially since, when we’re talking about DevOps, we recognize that each DevOps implementation and each DevOps experience, if you will, is different. You know, everyone is kind of a snowflake.

    So, how does that equate to the customer experience and how might that actually kinda trip up organizations if they’re looking to kind of add DevOps to their customer experience?

    Hudson: Yeah, absolutely. So, when I first started at Cyara, I led a very small strategic consulting group, and we worked with customers on how Cyara can help them through any major transformation. And because of the shift of the industry, it ended up being a lot of DevOps transformations. And so, we’ve seen customers at multiple different points in the journey, and the struggles that they’ve bumped into. And I think there are a number of different kind of pitfalls if you will, or lessons learned from that.

    And, you know, one of the first things—and we can go into as many of these that are of interest, but one of the first things and most important that pops out at us is that leadership level cultural shift. I think, so frequently—and I’m leading with this because if you don’t get this part right, it’s really gonna hold you up. But so frequently, DevOps is viewed as a technical or process change and so, it happens at the day to day level. But really, it is a mind shift, cultural shift, has to be top down, has to be embedded in the culture, and it has to be leadership driven.

    O’Hanlon: Mm-hmm, yeah. I agree, agree, and that goes across an entire organization, no matter where they’re implementing DevOps, whether it’s in IT or if it’s in the back office or marketing. Because we’re seeing this blending of so many different disciplines in an organization these days as ways to advance and accelerate just their ways of doing business.

    But to your point, if we don’t have, or if an organization doesn’t have that buy-in from the top, no matter where they’re implementing DevOps in an organization, it’s doomed to failure.

    Hudson: That’s right, that’s right. And it’s, you know, and it’s not just the kickoff, it’s not just somebody at the C level saying “rah rah” at the beginning.

    O’Hanlon: Right.

    Hudson: This is, like, through the process, embedding into how you motivate, incentivize, how you reward people, how you—you know, in your regular cadences. It’s everywhere. It needs to be treated as a cultural shift.

    O’Hanlon: Yeah, yeah. I totally agree. Now, what about, you know, beyond kind of that initial, as organizations start to kind of adopt this mindset and these principles, what are some of the things that maybe we call it kinda DevOps Phase Two or DevOps 2.0, the Second Day DevOps—what are some of the things that you guys are seeing that organizations need to be very mindful of to make sure that they are successful?

    Hudson: Yeah, another thing that we’re kinda bumping into at more of the kind of operational level is, as you know, the importance of flow in DevOps, right?

    O’Hanlon: Right.

    Hudson: You don’t wanna disrupt the flow. And to do that well, you have to think about automation, right? It’s just—it’s a no-brainer. It’s a pillar, right? And to me, when I think about automation, there’s a lot of different pockets you can automate. But for me, I think primarily around deployment automation and testing automation.

    We did an interview—or I did an interview with a consulting, one of the big four consultants with the DevOps expertise and a customer. And both of them agreed that automating the testing, while it’s not always completely simple or straightforward, it is, they would almost consider it the low hanging fruit, right? Get the testing automated so you can just kind of plug and play that part of it, don’t disrupt the flow.

    From a deployment perspective, there’s a number of different environments, right, to get something into production. So, the more you can automate from that perspective, the more you can continue to push things out and learn fast and fail fast, if you will.

    And so, finding those pockets of automation and having a strategy on how you can automate as much as possible as to not disrupt the flow is something that we’re really recommending to folks to realize the total benefit of the transformation.

    O’Hanlon: What about from a people perspective? You know, DevOps is as much about culture, as we know, as it is about the processes and the technologies. So, are there ways that organizations—maybe they’re not thinking about particular things when it comes to culture and people in their adoption of DevOps specifically for customer experience?

    Hudson: Yeah, sure. So, I would answer that a couple different ways. The first one I would talk about is essentially around—this is, again, it’s a culture thing. One of the pillars of DevOps is to create an environment that encourages learning and a safe place to fail. And so, you want your teams to be encouraged to fail if they have to and learn from it and get better the next time and feel safe doing that. So, that’s one from a person perspective.

    The other thing I would mention is just around measuring, key performance indicators, right? You can’t know if you’re successful without measuring, right?

    O’Hanlon: Mm-hmm.

    Hudson: And then publishing those KPIs so they’re transparent. Transparency is really important, so everybody is charging towards the same goal, and everybody feels like they are part of achieving that goal. So, let’s get the performance indicators out there, let’s be clear what we’re trying to achieve, let’s make people feel safe in that process. And, you know, that’s kinda the culture you wanna build around it.

    O’Hanlon: So, when we’re talking about customer service applications and software versus, say, an internal process or internal DevOps process or an internal application that is being advanced by these DevOps processes, what is the difference when we’re looking at what may be what those KPIs are or what the service level objectives are, things like that? Are there certain things that an organization needs to be more mindful of when they’re working on a customer experience type software rather than maybe more internal focused or maybe other customer that’s not maybe customer facing, end user customer facing?

    Hudson: Yeah, I think that’s a great question. And what we’re trying to do within our industry is create this mind shift where you are thinking about the end customer all the time—not just in the production environment, you are always thinking about the end customer experience through every step of the journey.

    And I’ll give you an example of what I mean by that. Traditionally, the contact center space, how they would monitor things in testing or production is kind of server loads or capacities, right? If it’s reached capacity, it’ll set off an alarm and that’s a problem, right? You don’t want it to be at capacity.

    Great, but you might not know what the customer experience is if that server is at capacity, right?

    O’Hanlon: Mm-hmm.

    Hudson: And so, at Cyara, what we’re trying to do is say—absolutely, that server might be at capacity and that’s a problem, but what is the customer experiencing in the moment right now in production? But we also wanna test in Dev and QA and UAT and performance testing, what the customer experience would be. So, if there’s an issue that comes up, you know it could be a pretty serious one, it could be calls being disconnected. If, in your revenue generating phone lines or chat windows, customers can’t get through—you wanna know that before it gets into production.

    O’Hanlon: Mm-hmm.

    Hudson: You don’t wanna know necessarily that—or it may be less helpful to know if a certain piece of technology is at capacity. What’s most valuable is to know what the customer would experience in that moment, even before it gets into production, if you can do that.

    O’Hanlon: Interesting. You know, it’s really fascinating to have the conversation about DevOps in different vertical markets, because everybody’s got something different that they’re really, really focusing their efforts on, but at the end of the day, it really is all about just making sure that the end user experience is the best it can be, and that the application is working as advertised and certainly that there’s a level of security as well within that application.

    So, I do imagine that security is also a big part of the equation, especially with the customer experience and the amount of sensitive data that a lot of contact centers, to your point, that they’re dealing with on a regular basis. So, heavy emphasis on Sec on DevSecOps?

    Hudson: Oh, absolutely. And that’s really from two ends. One is that customer data, right? There’s—you have to protect that. There are sensitivities, and those need to be protected, and we need to invest in those, and you need to be able to test that in production or prior to that if possible, right?

    But the other side of it, too, is around the regulatory requirements, right? Customers will—our customers, large companies—will get fined if certain requirements aren’t met, right? And so, from a pure business perspective, you’re motivated to make sure the customer is experiencing that requirement. But then from their own protective perspective, you’re also motivated.

    And so, DevSecOps, we really encourage people to fold security in very early in the discussions. It’s often one of the last things to come up—“Oh, wait, did we talk about security, did we bring in that team?” Fold them in early, complete transparency, get the conversations in and weave them into the process, because it’s critical.

    O’Hanlon: Excellent, excellent. Amy, this has been a great conversation. I’ve really, really enjoyed it, and would definitely love to have future conversations with you about other topics related to DevOps and the customer experience, because I really think that this is something that is—it’s not gonna be a one and done conversation. It’s like DevOps. Customer is an evolving conversation.

    But for now, thank you so much for taking the time and having the conversation with me. I do appreciate it.

    Hudson: Thanks for having me. It’s a privilege to be here.

    O’Hanlon: Alright, great. Alright, everybody, please stick around. We’ve got lots more Tech Strong TV coming up, so stay tuned.

    [End of Audio]