 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of OutSystems Next Step 2020 brought to you by OutSystems. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of OutSystems Next Step 2020. And we love when we get to be able to talk to the practitioners when we come to these events and happy to welcome to the program. First time, Gress, Bruce Bottles, he is the Digital Channels Director at Humana. I gave a presentation this year, also last year at the physical event. Bruce, thank you so much for joining us. Great to have you on theCUBE. Hey, Stu, thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. All right, so Bruce, Humana, a company that, you know, most people probably are familiar, you know, healthcare of course, super important in general and even more so in 2020. But if you could just set up for us a little bit, how should we think of Humana these days, your role inside the organization? And then we'll get into the discussion from there. Yeah, it's a great point, you know, because Humana is and has been going through a pretty significant transformation. And one of the big reasons why I joined Humana about two and a half years ago was this goal to go from just an insurance company to really a full service healthcare company. So to now we're really bridging the gateway where we're almost half of our staff, our caregivers, our doctors and nurses and clinicians and the other half of us kind of run the business. So my role is digital channels as you would expect, leading up efforts across humana.com, our mobile apps, go through 65 and other fitness and wellness apps as well as pharmacy business. So good question. Awesome, Bruce, I tell you, one of the, my favorite conversations over the last few years has been that discussion, you know, digital transformation, it was a buzzword. It gets a little bit overused, but from our standpoint, the companies that are doing it, you know, data is centrally important. We understand what we're doing. We're leveraging modern technologies and platforms out there. Can you bring us back a little bit, you know, two and a half years ago, I'm sure you're rapidly going through a whole bunch of changes, but, you know, what's the mandate? What are some of the key important pieces along that journey? Yeah, that's a great point because I do think digital transformation, unfortunately, is a little bit overused and like most technology waves can be hyped, you know, but the reality is for us at Humana is that, you know, our heart truly desires to reach our customers in new and better ways is to meet their needs not only that we know they have today, but to anticipate and forecast what those needs are going to be tomorrow and start building those solutions today for what we know they're going to need in the near future. So one of the challenges that I saw when I came to the company a couple of years ago was just the quality and the speed and ability to react to new opportunities and unforeseen circumstances and challenges is that ability to move very quickly. To me, that's one of the keys to digital transformation is that outcome, is speed and quality. Well, you know, Bruce, absolutely, you know, when 2020 hit, the commentary we had is those companies that have already gone down this journey, as you say, agility, being able to react really fast are happy that they've done it and anybody that hadn't really started down or gone fast were like, oh my gosh, I need to get there fast because obviously 2020 brought a lot of new challenges in place. I want to hold off one minute longer before talking about the specific 2020 challenges because you've got a great story there but out systems, you've been a partner with them, you spoke last year at the conference, why don't you bring us back as to how they first got involved and what was the plan pre 2020? Yeah, so my journey has been interesting. I've been a partner of out systems for about six years now actually and one of the reasons I came to Humana was the opportunity to introduce the company to a new way to this low code concept. I had used out systems to start a couple of companies prior to Humana and about 18 months ago we actually signed a first contract at Humana without systems. So what we really are enjoying now is this new opportunity to move quickly to build things differently and to respond to those, like I said, those opportunities that we maybe didn't have before. So that's my journey without systems that didn't start with Humana but have really enjoyed working with them over the last six years. Well, as you said, that ability to react fast is something that's been the promise of platforms, of clouds and the like. Well, 2020, you need to react fast. So Bruce, enough setup, I guess. Why don't you tell us how COVID-19, the impact, what you and your team needed to do to kind of move fast and get to what the internal as well as external customers we're going to need. Yeah, thanks for the intro. You know, really, let me take it back just a little bit to 2019. So in 2019, we realized that one of our top five interactions that our customers do is they come to our websites and our apps looking for a doctor or looking for a hospital or clinic or a pharmacy, an eye doctor, a dentist, et cetera. It's one of the top five interactions on our site. And what we realized is that it was a very disjointed experience. It had been grown up over years, not uncommon to most Fortune 50 companies. And it was a silo. If you wanted to find a medical doctor, it was different than if you wanted to find a vision doctor. And it was different if you wanted to find a pharmacy, et cetera. So not only was it a different experience for customers, but there were different technical solutions and the cost of maintaining those disparate solutions was really prohibitive to us innovating. So I set forth the strategy since I was the business owner of this capability of finding a doctor, I set the roadmap and said, we're going to unify them all. So that was our original challenge is to unify all of these finders to do a single provider finder. Well, that was going great. And right about the end of February, we had a pharmacy finder was the first one. And then COVID hit in March. And thank goodness it did hit then because we were ready to respond to one of the most important things our customers asked for. And that is, help me find a place to get a COVID-19 test. We had a giant spreadsheet that the call center was trying to maintain and manage and answer those calls as they would come in and say, hey, help me find a location to get a test. Well, if you know anything about COVID testing, it changes constantly. The testing locations change constantly. The type of tests they have, the supplies that they have, the hours of operations. So it was a daunting task, to say the least. So that's when I stood up and said, hey, can we volunteer? Can we gather a bunch of volunteers to quickly build some solutions that'll help not only the call center, but to help our customers serve themselves? So that's really where this COVID-19 test location came from. It was out of the genesis of what we had started doing on the provider finder space. Yeah, I'm curious, Bruce. I know you gave a presentation here at the event, kind of walk through what you had to build, but if you were to look at it, how long did it take to build the COVID test finder? And you've got lots of experience without systems. If you had not already started on this back in 2019, if you had just said, okay, I've got a spreadsheet. I need to bring in a technology. If I started from scratch, how much longer do you think it would have taken for your team to be able to react to deploy this new solution? Yeah, that's a great question. And one of the key victories I think we had is, honestly, the first challenge that I mentioned, the spreadsheet, we solved that spreadsheet problem in a weekend. So I pulled together some volunteers. I was one of them. And we actually built the replacement for the spreadsheet in a weekend. So that was pretty astounding. So the call center was grateful for that. And they quickly had a very unique solution there. But that was really just the touching point. Where we then took it to is building on top of this unified provider finder. We said, well, do you know what? The COVID-19 testing locations are in a sense, just another type of provider. So with that perspective, we started building a full back office suite where we had a team of 30 to 40 analysts, constantly looking across the United States and validating testing location information. Hours of operation, calling them, making sure that they're accurate, and then importing all the information into the centralized database that was in out systems. And then we quickly were able to build a customer experience where they could self-serve. Customers could go out there, do a search, finding a testing location themselves. I'd say timeline. We spent about a month building the back office and then deploying out the first version to our customers as well. Very, very rapid, very high quality. And what we've taken it further even since that first month, we're just now actually building it into and integrating it with a health bot that we have developed in parallel separately. But it just illustrates the agility that we've had the flexibility to be able to take a solution that started out as, hey, I want to find a doctor to quickly morph to help me find a test location for COVID-19. Yeah, it's amazing, Bruce. I think back in my career, very early in my career, how long it would take to build the schema, build out a database and populate all the data on how many interns you need to do that to the websites to now that modern app deployment. So 30 days, that's phenomenal from kind of full end and obviously you still have some resources keeping things up to date. Do you have a rough swag? If you hadn't already been using out systems, would this have been two, three months or is getting from the ground up, how long does that take? Yeah, great question. Overall, so short answer is probably what it took us about four months using traditional methods. So instead of four months, about a month. And that's pretty consistent, what is what we've seen with all of the apps that we've built so far without systems. We're seeing about four times the value, I like to say four X value and that being a quarter of the cost, the quarter of the time. And we typically will over deliver on scope. It's not too often you can say that, we've made it on budget, on time, but we over delivered scope. But generally speaking, we're seeing about four X value. Now I would say coincidentally when I was doing the startups I mentioned earlier, I would see up to 10 X value compared to traditional hand coding and large development teams in the startup environment. So smaller companies I think should expect to see even better than four X. Well, that's great. Bruce, since you have such a long history without systems, I'd love to get your take on some of the enhancements. You look at, it's not just a platform, but they're helping give guidance to build faster. There's really AI being built in. What have you seen over the years? What's exciting you these days? Anything else that you're kind of asking for that maybe we should be looking for down on the roadmap? Yeah, that's one of the greatest things I really enjoy about the OutSystems partnership is their level of investment in the platform. And they're like, I'm constantly trying to think forward in healthcare, what are our customers going to need tomorrow? OutSystems is doing the same saying, hey, what is Bruce going to need to drive his digital business forward in the future? So two big things really come to mind. Number one is mobile. When version 10 was launched, I started on version nine. When version 10 was launched, it was lights out when it came to mobile. It was an absolute game changer. For the first time, I didn't have to have a large iOS and Android team and a web team and a back office team. So typically I'd have four different teams when those specialties didn't need that anymore. We could do full stack now with just about any developer. So that was huge. The second huge innovation is, I would say the AI you mentioned is that now that the new developer productivity that you see embedded in the app, the suggestions, it's almost like the platform anticipates what developers need next in their daily tasks. So I know that's been a big help. Then I think the last thing that I'm looking forward to that I know they're working on feverishly is really bringing it more to even a wider audience of citizen developers. So designers, we've got a few use cases where our marketing team has worked with us and some of their marketers and designers that aren't developers at all saw us building things. And they said, hey, you know, after the first couple of apps they designed with us, they said, I think we can do this ourselves for some basic things. So they did, they started building some basic things. So I'm really looking forward to that push out towards more business folks even further than what they've already done before. Yeah, but Bruce, this is such a good point, something I've seen in the serverless community really enabling, as I said, back in the early days, it was programming. You wrote lines of code. Coding was you pulled pieces. The discussion of low code is trying to make it even simpler. And with more modern platforms, more modern tools, as you said, it can anticipate things. You don't need to, you can even have that citizens developer, as you said, go out there. So Bruce, wanna give you the final word, just value you've seen. You've been part of the OutSystems events in the past. What do you enjoy talking to your peers about, sharing your story, what are the things that you wanna make sure that people, if they're coming to virtual and maybe it's their first time, understand about shows like Next Step? Yeah, Next Step is just a fantastic event. It's like I always said it, I'm a calendar, never miss it. Disappointed I won't be able to sit and have a meal with some of the folks in person, but we'll get to it next year. But no, I'd say the sessions, of course, my session I was excited to share more detail on how we went about creating this COVID-19 and this universal finder. So there's tons and tons and tons of sessions just like those get great insights and to make new contacts as well. So I would encourage folks to pick me up on Twitter, pick me up on LinkedIn and others and network because when it comes down to it, we're all innovators and we're all trying to solve the needs of the communities that we serve. And I believe we're better together. So thanks for having me. Well, Bruce, we'd love being able to share those stories. Thank you so much for what you were able to do, such a valuable important thing at the community as a whole. And thank you for sharing your story on theCUBE. You're great. Thanks again for having me. Thanks, Stu. Stay with us for a lot more coverage from OutSystems Next Step, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.