Pivotal Conversations

Each year, the CF Summit brings together users, customers, and other community members. Dormain gives us a tour of the conference with some highlights. Plus, we cover some recent news and talk about open source foundations.

In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Stark & Wayne's Dr. Nic Williams discusses why it's important to treat your platform-as-product. The short answer: It results in a more customer-oriented mindset. Listen to the full episode to learn more, including how putting some constraints on developers plays an important role.

This week, we talk with James Urquhart who joined Pivotal recently in the CTO group. We talk about some architectural ideas for converting the enterprise over to an event-driven flow, discuss the reasons for doing multi-cloud, and also what kinds of conversations "executives" find helpful. Coté does a great job mangling Pivotal product names. Also, hot takes on "on-premises" vs. "on-premise."

In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Helpful.com's Farhan Thawar* talks about the challenges of building a company from scratch, why it's important to apply smart architectural principals to empower development teams, and why he strives for boring infrastructure. *Editor's note: Helpful.com was acquired by Shopify following the recording of this episode but before its publication. Farhan and the entire Helpful.com team joined Shopify where they continue to pursue their mission of making communication and collaboration more seamless and effective.

While they are both big and hulking, unlike the dinosaurs the mainframe still walks among us. In this episode of Pivotal Insights, our own Michael Minella makes the case for mainframe modernization and shares lessons learned from the field.

Getting the blinking cursor of kubernetes up and running is only half the job: the other is actually running software in it. While at SpringOne Tour Charlotte, Paul Czarkowski walks Coté through how that's done using the classic Spring Music and Pet store applications. We also discuss burger innovation in Charlotte and the thumb method.

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

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

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

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

Knate-ive by Pivotal Software

How's your year go? Pretty good? Well, regardless, it's almost over, so that means it's time for some predictions! Before Richard and Coté go over some hopes and dreams for 2019, they review some 2018 predictions. Some didn't work out at all, some were exactly correct, but, as always, most of them were in the ballpark. Also, the mystery of why we have a flat-head screw driver when the phillips is so clearly superior.

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

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

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

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

Perhaps the phrase "business transformation" is what we should say instead of "digital transformation." If the goal of IT transformation is to switch over your organization from an operations, service provider to a product-centric approach, it fits better. While at SpringOne Platform 2018, I talked with West's Thomas Squeo about how West has been making this shift from an IT-as-operators and project gnomes to end-to-end product people. We also discuss the other side of the transformation, how the product people and the executive team learn about technologies like containers and microservices and start thinking about how those innovations let them change the core business. Thomas also gives advice on the career path to becoming a CTO: build up a diverse career path instead of sticking in just one lane.

It's easy to understand what kind of IT culture you need if you're going to improve how you do software, but how do you actually change such a squishy thing? While at SpringOne Platform 2018, I talked with Kyle Campose about how he's done it. We also talk about the phrase "digital transformation" and some sandwich ontology.

You often hear about the "product manager," but rarely about what they actually do day-to-day. This episode we talk with Pivotal's Jonathan Sirlin about product management using several examples of applications and organizations he's worked with. He talks in-depth about one application he and team worked on, covering the process they used to find, prioritize, and then create features and software.

"More and more, we see that more traditional, enterprise-y use cases start to fall into these categories," Mark Fisher, Pivotal. Few topics are driving more interest than "serverless." Pivotal has been working on a function framework called Project Riff for awhile. At its core, it's an event driven model for building applications. Recently, the team announced that riff works on knative. We discuss riff, knative, and serverless in general. There's also a little bit of news this week, and some herring history.