cloud realities podcast

Each episode, our hosts Dave and Sjoukje talk to cloud leaders and practitioners to understand how previously untapped business value can be released, how to deal with the challenges and risks that come with bold ventures and how does human experience factor into all of this?

They cover Smart Industry, Customer Experience, Sustainability, Data and Insight, Cyber, Cost, Leadership, Talent and, of course, Tech.  

Together, Dave and Sjoukje have over 50 years of cloud and transformation experience and act as our guides though a new reality each week.

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Episode 17

CR011: Criticality of Psychological Safety in Digital Transformation with Duena Blomstrom

Modern ways of working require significant engagement from everyone involved to ensure the right things are getting done and the right time and the levels of creativity are sustained for innovation.  How do we get the balance right?

Dave, Sjoukje & Rob are joined by Duena Blomstrom, CEO of PeopleNotTech, author and influencer to discuss what drives a teams performance is it process, technology, method, or does it come down to things that are actually far more human?  The team discuss why Psychological Safety remains a critical element in driving outcomes from modern teams and get an insight into Duenas thinking on “Human Debt”. Finally, the team discuss the other elements that make up modern high performing teams.

TLDR:

• 00:38 Intros
• 00:52 Cloud conversation with Duena Blomstrom
• 27:00 What makes up High Performing Teams
• 31:30 I just want to sleep ’till 05:30!

Further Reading:

• Google Paper: https://rework.withgoogle.com/print/guides/5721312655835136/
• Book: People Before Tech  https://amzn.eu/d/aE2t0DX

Duenas new book is out later this year

Episode 16

CR010: The opportunities and challenges of Cloud in Defence with Gareth Hetheridge

Cloud is maturing in its ability to deal with complex, highly secure & regulated environments, and there are very few more complex environments than the Defence sector.

Episode 15

CR009: Increasingly mission critical data & AI with Robin Sutara

Dave, Sjoukje & Rob are joined by Robin Sutara, Field CTO at Databricks to discuss the reality of data usage today.  They talk about he characteristics of organisations that have successfully created a data transformation to rethink how business gets done, supply chains in a de-globalising world, the importance of clarity of outcome and data delivery team diversity.

The team also talk about the incredible launch, potential and concerns around ChatGPT.

TLDR:

• 01:00 Intros
• 01:37 Cloud conversation with Robin Sutara
• 27:26 The incredible rise of ChatGPT
• 35:35 Being back on the same timezone as my calls!

Episode 14

CR008: The Cloud Value Flywheel Effect pt.2 with Anderson, McCann & O’Reilly

In this second part, Dave, Sjoukje & Rob continue their talk with David Anderson, Mark McCann & Micheal O’Reilly authors of ‘The Value Flywheel Effect: Power the Future and Accelerate your Organisation to the Modern Cloud’, and hear about how the book came to fruition and the Cloud transformation model that they developed from their time at Liberty Mutual and you anyone can leverage it to drive value, starting today!

In Tech Trends we talk about the increasing pace of organisations moving to the cloud, find out where analysts think we will be in 3 years time and why that might be true.

TLDR:

• 00:48 Intro
• 01:10 Cloud conversation with David Anderson, Mark McCann & Micheal O’Reilly
• 25:46 Increasing pace of tech infrastructure migration to cloud
• 32:11 Reactions to the book!

Further reading:

Book:

• The Value Flywheel Effect: Power the Future and Accelerate Your Organization to the Modern Cloud, David anderson
• Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge

Episode 13

CR007: The Cloud Value Flywheel Effect pt.1 with Anderson, McCann & O’Reilly

In this first part, Dave, Sjoukje & Rob meet David Anderson, Mark McCann & Micheal O’Reilly authors of ‘The Value Flywheel Effect: Power the Future and Accelerate your Organisation to the Modern Cloud’, and hear about their time at Liberty Mutual where, hungry for pioneering techniques, they drove a serverless centric cloud transformation and started to talk to Simon Wardly about value streams.

In Tech Trends this week we talk about something on everyones mind, the cost of Cloud as we run into 2023 and discuss best practice ways to manage it.

TLDR:

• 01:35 Intros
• 02:30 Cloud conversation with David Anderson, Mark McCann & Micheal O’Reilly
• 36:58 Managing Cloud cost
• 46:00 The second time around!

Further reading:

Book:

• The Value Flywheel Effect: Power the Future and Accelerate Your Organization to the Modern Cloud, David anderson
• Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge

Episode 12

CR006: Christmas Special! Are we living in a simulation, and does it matter? with Anders Indset

For some special Christmas food for thought, we focus on the far reaches of our “Realities”.  Here on the show we believe that interventional, courageous leadership combined with cloud can change the future reality of a business or human.  But, what is real? What is not? And does it matter?!

We look at the thinking currently happening in the space of the Simulation Hypothesis, which suggests that we likely live in a computer simulation, and ask how it can be applied to solve “better problems” and improve our innovation ambition.

Dave and Sjoukje are reunited with re:Invent Roving Reporter Rob Kernahan, who’s finally back from Vegas, and they talk to Anders Indset, Philosopher, Author and renowned speaker to get his insights following some recent research he has been participating in, in this field, as well as his thinking on The Quantum Economy (links below).

Finally, in tech trends we talk about the EUs recent use of the Metaverse to engage Gen Z in the work they do.  It was ill attended sadly, so the team speculate on what might have happened.

TLDR:

• 01:36 Intros
• 02:14 Cloud conversation with Anders IndsetEU in the MetaverseChristmas with family and a Quantum Economy trilogy!

Further Reading:

• Do we live in a [quantum] simulation? Constraints, observations, and experiments on the simulation hypothesis
• The Quantum Economy: Saving the Mensch with Humanistic Capitalism

Episode 11

CR005: Digitalisation in healthcare with Tony Ambrozie

The healthcare care industry has been disrupted, with new entrants to the industry and tech, such as wearables, providing consumers with far more information and options, huge change is occurring.  How are healthcare providers responding to their customers’ expectations and health needs?

Dave and Sjoukje talk to Chief Digital & Information Officer of Baptist Health, Tony Ambrozie to hear about how they are using cloud to respond and transform their organisation, and how a step wise approach to cloud now sees them 70% migrated and well on the way to using tech to proactively improve patient health. 

Finally, in tech trends, they talk about how UK Government is using an innovative AI incentive scheme to help tackle decarbonisation.

TLDR:

• 01:06  Intros
• 01:48  Cloud conversation with Tony Ambrozie
• 20:54  AI for Decarbonisation
• 23:25  Improving patient health!

Episode 10

CR004: The digitalisation of marketing with James Trezona

The marketing industry has been at the spear head of digitalisation, both in how its customers are changing their expectations and in how marketing professionals work on a day to day basis, increasing both scale of reach and the ability to create meaningful experiences.  

Dave and Sjoukje talk to the Founder of Rooster Punk, James Trezona, to hear his perspective on how his profession has been transformed, but also how critical it is to focus on human and customer experience.  Finally, they reflect on the implications of Elon Musks recent take-over of Twitter.

Episode 9

CRLIVE006: AWS re:Invent 2022 Summary & Analysis with Hemant Sharma

The team are at AWS re:Invent 2022 for our first live shows!

Hemant Sharma, Partner Solutions, AWS joins us to look back over the show, recap the big trends and look at their real world application.

Episode 8

CRLIVE005: Cloud sustainability with Tom Metzeler

The team are at AWS re:Invent 2022 for our first live shows!

Tom Metzeler, Partner Solutions, AWS rejoins us to talk about how the cloud can help organisations reduce their impact on the environment.  And with all the talk this week of processor heavy work loads, like ML, or supermassive architectures, how can these be implemented safely?

Roving Reporter Rob reports on Day 3 and the final trends emerging.

Episode 7

CRLIVE004: Cloud driven business transformation with Jonathan Allen

The team are at AWS re:Invent 2022 for our first live shows!

Jonathan Allen, Director Enterprise Strategy, AWS joins us to talk about what drives cloud transformation and how not to sabotage yours!

Rob updates us on what’s trending on Day 2 of the show.

Episode 6

CRLIVE003: Lessons from a scale early adopter with Dimitris Perdikou

The team are at AWS re:Invent 2022 for our first live shows!

Dimitris Perdikou, Head of Engineering, Home Office, UK Government shares with us the Home Office early adoption (at scale) of the cloud, seven years ago(!) and the challenges that bring when you move to second generation cloud.Dimitris Perdikou

It’s Day 2 and the big themes of the conference are becoming clearer, our Roving Reporter Rob reports!

Episode 5

CRLIVE002: Re-Skilling your enterprise with Phil Le-Brun
The team are at AWS re:Invent 2022 for our first live shows!

Phil LeBrun, Enterprise Strategist, AWS, talks to us about why re-skilling your teams is critical not just to your transformations success, what it takes and why it’s such a leadership challenge.

Roving Reporter Rob Kernahan updates us on what else is trending on Day 1 of the show.

Episode 4

CRLIVE001: AWS Innovation Insights with Tom Metzeler

The team are at AWS re:Invent 2022 for our first live shows!

Tom Metzeler, Partner Solutions, AWS, shares with us Amazon’s innovation process and how we can all leverage these techniques for purpose driven accelerated product development.

Roving reporter Rob Kernahan updates us on what’s trending on Day 1 of the show.

Episode 3

CR003: The role of leadership in cloud value creation with Alastair Kidd

In our three launch episodes, Dave and Sjoukje look at the cloud market from three different angles: the market itself, how CxO’s are viewing that market and from a personal leadership experience perspective.

In our final launch episode, they talk to Systemic Leadership Sherpa, Alastair Kidd about how embarking on a cloud transformation journey could also be a personal development journey!  How that could help reframe your leadership action to more effectively drive business value out of the cloud and why you need to be aware of the Complexity Paradox!  Finally, they talk about Googles recent announcement about opening new regions in Europe and speculate on why.

TLDR:

• 01:07 Intros
• 01:51 Cloud conversation with Alastair Kidd
• 22:10 The complexity paradox
• 28:20 Why so many cloud regions?
• 32:32 Chickens!

Further Reading:

• A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making
• The Complexity Paradox

Episode 2

CR002: The CxO perspective on cloud with Daniel Hartert

In our three launch episodes, Dave and Sjoukje look at the cloud market from three different angles: the market itself, how CxO’s are viewing that market and from a personal leadership experience perspective.

In this second episode, they talk to CxO Advisor, Daniel Hartert to get insights into the conversations he is currently having with CxOs on driving value from of the cloud in their organisations and the challenges they face.  He also shares his personal journey with the cloud.  Finally, they talk about how current economic environment will influence decision making on cloud over the coming years.

TLDR:

• 00:43 Intros
• 03:00 Cloud conversation with Daniel Hartert
• 26:59 Cloud cost
• 32:09 A nice weekend!

Episode 1

CR001: Cloud Definitions and 2023 Trends Overview

In our three launch episodes, Dave and Sjoukje look at the cloud market from three different angles: the market itself, how CxO’s are viewing that market and from a personal leadership experience perspective.

In this first episode, they discuss some basic definitions for aspects of the cloud, to level set, then go on to talk about the current trends that are being felt industry wide and that are likely to impact 2023 and beyond.  Finally, they discuss the latest in AI image creation, DALL-E, and its possibilities.

TLDR:

• 00:39 Intros
• 03:09 Cloud conversation: Definitions
• 15:32 Cloud conversation: Trends 2023
• 28:10 DALL-E

Episode 0

CR000: Intro’s

Meet the team and find out what we will be covering on the show.