The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network

It’s 2022: Are you ready to jump on a plane? Are your customers? What might it take to make all of us comfortable with the idea of traveling, once again, across the globe? We’ve been thinking about such questions because we’ve been prompted by the insights from *Consumers Unmasked: Stage 2,* part of our longitudinal, international research initiative. In this episode of *The Resonance Test,* Jasmin Guthmann, Senior Director of Global Partner Marketing at Contentstack and Daniel Smythe, Vice President of Retail & Hospitality Consulting for EPAM Continuum, sojourn deep into the topic of contemporary travel. Guthmann herself admits that it’s a tense moment for travel: “I've just come off my first long haul flight myself and the level of anxiety added is incredible.” To offset this, she says, the travel industry must provide “as much certainty as possible.” But the travel challenges aren’t just about pandemic fear and uncertainty; they also include economics. Learning that 44% of *Consumers Unmasked* respondents said they couldn't afford a vacation, Guthmann said: “That's pretty dire,” adding: “I don't think discounts will be the way to go” and that young travel customers “need highly attractive offers,” personalized and customized offers, at “the right price for what [they] want.” Together, Guthmann and Smythe talk intelligently about taking customer experience seriously, the personalization tech can play, staycations and remote work, the importance of privacy for today’s travelers, and travel must do to attain, especially for young customers, “that more playful vibe again.” Host: Macy Donaway Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

Every organization has silos—even ours. But EPAM’s culture is unique in that it allows, even encourages, individuals to disregard silos, take initiative, and connect deeply with others. Lynn Rivenburgh, a VP of Business Consulting at EPAM, is a superb practitioner of silo busting, and in this episode of *Silo Busting,* she talks producer Ken Gordon through her process. While interviewing, Rivenburgh, who was hired in June 2021, asked her interlocutors whom she should connect, and after collective some relevant names: “I did reach out to people on LinkedIn [and] they were super receptive.” Since then, she built on this networking and set up monthly meetings with a number of organizational leaders. Listen and learn about her work with the Women’s Circle, a self-regulated, cross-functional EPAM community: “It's different people all over the organization, at different levels, and [colleagues] not within my practice necessarily, which has been great.” Rivenburgh has enjoyed Circle life—whose Circle is one of eight—because it opens a window into “other parts of the org and how they operate.” The Circle clearly provides much psychological safety (“Whatever is said in the group stays in the group; it’s confidential,” says says) and builds a terrific amount of trust. Her group includes a man, who happens to be the person to whom she reports. Mentorship junior practitioners is a big theme for Rivenburgh. “I think it's not just it's not just the most important thing I do on a daily basis, but I think it's the most rewarding as well,” she says, adding: “My job is to find my successor so I can elevate myself personally within my career.” When Rivenburgh talks about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion work or her—and her six-year-old daughter’s involvement—in the EPAM eKids program https://www.epam.com/careers/blog/learning-from-scratch (“They're reaching out to millions and millions of kids across the globe; the breadth and depth of what they've done from programming language is absolutely incredible, “) you’ll be inspired. In terms of advice for listeners and colleagues: Rivenburgh suggests we willingly banish themselves from the comfort zone and learn to become better networkers and listeners. She concludes with some words about how all her internal networked applies to the outside world as well. She’s insurance expert, she says, but “I'm not a cloud expert, not necessarily a data analytics and predictive modeling expert.” But because she has a great internal network, “I'm able to bring those resources to the table with me to have those conversations with clients.” Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

Data: Organizations have an incessant demand for it, in order to operate and innovate—but at the same time, gathering and analyzing all this data creates legitimate privacy concerns. This is what John Reardon, VP & Senior Director of Global Risk Solutions Technology at Liberty Mutual Insurance, calls the *data paradox,* and he talks about it on our latest episode of *The Resonance Test.* Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, poses some questions to Reardon and Val Tsitlik, EPAM’s Head of Big Data Practice and VP of Technology Solutions, about how the data paradox works in their worlds. Together this data-wise trio talks through the nuances of the data paradox. It’s fascinating in that they chat not just about, say, the relevance of anonymization but the idea of synthetic data (a generated data set that matches the semantics of an actual real data set). Rehman says to Tsitlik that synthetic data allows for testing more closely to real-life scenarios and Tsitlik replies: “I'm almost thinking of this as creating a Sims world”—almost, but not quite, starting a conversation about the metaverse. Listen and learn about data governance in our ever-growing regulatory environment (“It may feel counterintuitive that governance can equal acceleration, but in this space it actually is a key enabler,” says Reardon), tooling (“People always say it's not about the tool, but anybody that actually ever tried to fell a tree with a pocket knife before could tell you sometimes it is about the tool,” notes Rehman), and the always-relevant topic of budgets. Speaking of budgets, if you’re a data or security professional, open up your calendar; you’ll need set aside 30 minutes to listen to this conversation. Host: Glenn Gruber Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

In 2022, Technology evolves fast—faster than the technologists who use it. In order for organizations to put this tech to work for them, they need to have a good understanding of the talent ecosystem, and how to work within it. As Eli Feldman, EPAM’s CTO of Advanced Technology, says, on the latest episode of *Silo Busting:* “Business capabilities are evolving faster than ever and therefore the technology capabilities that support the business capabilities must keep up.” Feldman’s interlocutor is Sandra Loughlin, Managing Principal and Head of Client Learning & Talent Enablement at EPAM, who makes the important point that companies don’t just need to keep their training their employees on new skills, they need to do so longitudinally. When it comes to the issue of developing capabilities, Loughlin says, it needs to “span entire career changes, especially as automation has changed the roles that people have” and raises the questions of “whether those roles even exist” in the future. Back and forth, Loughlin and Feldman go, talking about the importance of training people in a way that makes sense for their business (“Getting the right content to the right people at the right time, right way,” says Loughlin) and applying it to their daily work, aligning skills strategy and capability strategy, the capability academy model, mentorship, EPAM’s learning infrastructure, our approach to assessments (Feldman says EPAM focuses “extensively on making sure that assessment is in reality all about guiding the individual toward their next milestone in their career”), and more. Eavesdrop on Feldman and Loughlin and you’ll soon understand much about creating a healthy talent ecosystem here. Lucky for you, the learning process is as simple as hitting the “play” button. Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

The search is on! All over the internet, in conference rooms, on ill-lit Zoom calls, anxious executives are straining to understand the still-obscure concept of Web3. The term dares you to define it and to explain why organizations should care—and that’s what we're here for, on the latest episode of *Silo Busting.* Our experts, Alexandra "Sasha" Pitkevich, EPAM’s Blockchain Lead, and Érica Moreti, Head of Strategy & Innovation and Physical Experience for EMEA for EPAM Continuum, answer some essential questions from Producer Ken Gordon about the technical and business implications of Web3. They begin by building off of Gavin Wood’s famed definitional haiku: “Less trust, more truth.” Pitkevich talks about Web3 as a place “where the infrastructure and the data are owned by the creators of this infrastructure.” Moreti sees it as a “decentralized ecosystem based on the blockchain” in which platforms and apps aren’t “owned by a central gatekeeper anymore but rather by the users themselves, who would earn their ownership stake by helping develop and maintain those services.” They dig into those often-tossed-around terms *centralization* and *decentralization.* Pitkevich says that our internet is current running on a “centralized concept, where the majority of the users are coming to one server, one database.” As for decentralization, Moreti talks about a system that’s “distributed in the homogenous way to a connected network of people and devices.” Together, they address the confusion people have between Web3 and the metaverse. “When we're speaking about multiverse, we are speaking about a huge interactive presentation layer of internet,” says Pitkevitch, adding: “When we speak about Web3, we are speaking to the complete internet infrastructure,” in which all the layers—presentation layer, middleware, the back end—are, you guessed it, *decentralized.* It’s a good, useful dialogue. Their conversation addresses the essential context around Web3: the economic implications and business opportunities, the challenges of digital identity, and the power of communities. If you need an introduction to Web3, you must listen to these two. Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

“Therapy is always conducted at a distance,” writes Hannah Zeavin in her original, unusual new book, *The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy.* The volume is an historical closeup on teletherapy, a term she defines as “those therapies facilitated by a class of techniques and tools that allow patients to communicate with clinicians or volunteers or machines, not in their physical proximity at the time of communication.” With this subject, it seemed natural for our Boston-bound producer, Ken Gordon, to record a digital, long-distance conversation with Zeavin (who spoke to us from Oakland, California). Zeavin reports that teletherapy is hardly a new phenomenon; the first analytic encounter involved Freud himself, in his written correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess. It has, she says, “accompanied the entire history of clinical psychology in many forms.” She catalogues the various forms of teletherapy—radio broadcasts, call-in shows, e-therapy—but insists we remember that “no matter what, communication is nearly impossible, whether it's two-way and synchronous or one-way and asynchronous, and that's really at the core of what people deal with in psychodynamic treatment.” Zeavin notes that communication issues are, generally speaking, “also what we deal with as daily habitual users of media.” Zeavin and Gordon probe the ways in which teletherapy has threatened the expertise of therapists and empowered patients, experimented with artificial intelligence, raised issues of privacy and confidentiality, given the vulnerable more access and made them vulnerable, and changed the participants in and business model of therapy (“teletherapy has long been free and low fee and therefore served a sort of larger group of patients, including those who are marginalized and traditionally underserved”). They talk of Winnicott, Freudmania, the anxiety of mediation, Shakespeare, Harold Bloom, even Fran Lebowitz! So what kind of progress have we made? Well, Zeavin had this to say this about how Microsoft Teams can record and instantly transcribe meetings: “It can really arrest creativity and spontaneity to have that much feedback. There's a reason why the analyst is enjoined not to interpret immediately but to allow for a kind of free association, and that to me sounds like the death of it.” One of Zeavin’s central concepts is auto-intimacy, which is “a closed-circuit of self-communication, ruth through a relationship to a media object.” She says it “has been increasingly encouraged. It's part of gamification, right?” But can that kind of auto-intimacy lead to deep psychological healing? Not really. “All of the kinds of therapies that rely on this kind of auto-intimacy, don't care,” she says. “They're not interested at all, in something called the unconscious or interested in that kind of psychodynamic work.” We think Zeavin's work will help both therapists and their patients move forward in this blended century. People are, she says, “in and out of their offices, and they're really looking for some guidance as to how to do that. It really changes almost everything about therapy.” Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

In 2022, you aren’t just what you eat. You’re also where and how and why and when and with whom you do so. It’s a whole new integrated experience, as we learned from Stage 2 of our *Consumers Unmasked* research project. To enrich the study’s palate of insights, and help restaurateurs better understand their diners and employees, we convened three experts—Buck Sleeper, Head of Retail Experience Consulting in EPAM Continuum’s North American Digital Engagement Practice; Barbara Castiglia, Executive Editor of *Modern Restaurant Management* magazine and host of *The Main Course* podcast; and Nicole France, Product Marketing Evangelist at Contentful—to consider report’s findings. The conversation provides a full menu of insights. For starters, freshness matters to diners, in a holistic sense. “Freshness is not only in the ingredient itself but it's in the entire meal that you're having,” says Sleeper. And ghost kitchens are here to stay—and are the drivers of new food ventures, according to Castiglia. “For a little bit of investment, you could have some new restauranteurs out there.” “You don't even need a taco truck,” says France. The group chewed over the idea of data—both the importance of big data for restaurants, and for small data as well. “Sometimes you really don't know what customers want unless you have a conversation,” says France. France also talked about making data relevant and legible for employees: “It's all about interpreting that data into something meaningful, and honestly, that's a hell of a lot easier to share than big data sets.” Sleeper notes that a quarter of *Consumers Unmasked’s* US respondents are watching food and video tutorials. Castiglia replies that, for restauranteurs, “Your digital footprint is very, very important now. So you have to examine which of these channels make the most sense for your brand and spend the time to put together an effort to engage with your guests.” But the truth is, those guests might be difficult to reach. France says that many young people have are completely comfortable with delivery apps and online ordering but also have “this strange but very deeply held fear of actually interacting with people. So whether that's picking food up or eating in a restaurant, I think there's going to have to be something that adapts to that trend.” Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

In the brand-new book, *SuperSight: What Augmented Reality Means for Our Lives, Our Work, and the Way We Imagine the Future,* David Rose writes: “*SuperSight is this decade’s convergence technology.* It inherits the last thirty-plus years of enabling technologies like machine learning, computer vision, wearables, edge computing, 5G wireless, deep personalization, affective computing, and new interaction paradigms like gesture and voice—packaged in the familiar wear-all-day form of glasses.” In the brand-new episode of *The Resonance Test,* Rose—a friend and former EPAM Continuum colleague—unpacks that statement with producer Ken Gordon, pulling out a long chain of colorful conversational insights. SuperSight is an integrated technology, Rose says, that can “orchestrate and help simplify and tune and customize a lot of other systems, as long as there's open standards for how things talk to each other.” Operating at systems level can help us with in a variety of almost magical ways, such as personalized digital coaching, enhanced accurate medical diagnosis, and augmented learning. But it’s not all good news—or a simple story. Rose walks through though the garden of dramatically named SuperSight Hazards—Social Insulation, State of Surveillance, Cognitive Crutches, Persuasive Persuasion, Training Bias, and SuperSight for Some—taking the time to explain the real dangers of this developing tech. Rose shuttles us all around the SuperSight universe, talking about creating prototypes to help people with handwashing during the pandemic (one of which involved “using cuteness to seduce people into washing for 20 seconds”), the possibilities of glanceable commerce (will we go from eye tracking to the shopping cart?), the challenges of diminished reality, SuperSight city planning, even using AR to read his book. So listen to this SuperSight-flavored conversation. It’ll augment your intelligence. Host: Kenji Ross Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

What does it mean to be at the vanguard of leadership training? To find out, listen to Vanguard’s Michael Gunn. He’s the investment management company’s Global IT Audit Department Head—and the guy responsible for the firm’s unique leadership training program. In the latest episode of *The Resonance Test,* Sandra Loughlin, Managing Principal and Head of Client Learning & Talent Enablement at EPAM, grills Gunn all about Vanguard’s A+ Leadership Program for IT. “It's something that I haven't seen before,” she says, noting its “comprehensive, 360, whole-organization approach.” Gunn tells the pedagogic tale of how he gleaned, from listening closely to colleagues, that they prefer experiential learning and then set up a program that blocked of sections of time to provide such content *and* focused, small-group follow-up discussions (“Where leaders *really* like to dive deeper into the conversation and share more insights is in these six, seven, eight person IT leadership cadres,” says Gunn). This enabled leaders to connect with each other, reflect on what they’d learned, and ask: “How are you actually infusing learning into your day-to-day responsibility, both personally as well as with your team?” The networked approach allows Vanguard’s leader-learners to focus on implementation, which is something that Loughlin and this podcast heartily endorse. It is a living, evolving process; as Gunn says: “It's not just one event. It's not just one conversation. It's this iteration on a topic.” Listen closely and Gunn will teach you that when it comes to learning, it’s smart to think like a product owner and work to understand product-market fit. So if your organization could stand to improve its learning process, feel free to eavesdrop on the Gunn-Loughlin back-and-forth. You might just pick up an A+ insight or two. Host: Toby Bottorf Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

It’s playtime on *The Resonance Test.* Let’s welcome Ricardo Álvarez, MIT researcher and co-author, with Fábio Duarte, of *Urban Play: Make-Believe, Technology, and Space,* into the magic circle of our podcast. We’re going to talk about how playing with new technologies is what enables real transformations to happen. Ken Gordon, our producer, goes hyper-ludic for this conversation and jumps with Álvarez on the big podcasting trampoline. They get into the interactive narrative of Disneyland (“This is storytelling in physical form,” says Álvarez), the co-designing of video games (“You effectively give players the tools not just to play the game, but ultimately to hack the game and express themselves through gameplay”), and the extremely flexible nature of the metaverse: “Because it's virtual it comes with the advantages of virtuality, which means not only can it be infinite, but it can be whatever you want. It doesn't need to subscribe to the laws of physics, the laws of nature.” At one point, Gordon actually pretends to be an annoyed client, an inveterate optimizer, who doubts the value of all this playfulness. “When you push for optimization, you're pushing towards specialization of these technologies, which means that your evolutionary path for that technology becomes constrained,” replies Álvarez, cool as a whole salad of cucumbers. Álvarez brings up the idea that playfulness “is the attitude that helps us differentiate between ethical self-deception and sheer manipulation” and the challenges of going beyond prototypes in Fab Labs (“How do you move output for a Fab Lab to scale?”). He also chews on the fact that we’re at an inflection point in VR history: “We're sitting at a moment in time when we are fundamentally designing the language of the new medium” and the responsibilities this creates for those at the table. Well, what are you waiting for? Join the fun. Leap in. Hit Play. Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon