 Hey everyone, welcome to this cubes special program series, Women of the Cloud brought to you by AWS and your host for the series, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to be joined by Patty Jordan, the VP of enabling processes and technology at Optimus, my next guest. Patty, welcome to the program. Hi Lisa, thank you for having me. Tell me a little bit about yourself, a little bit about your role so the audience gets that understanding of exactly who you are. Sure thing, my name is Patty Jordan, as we mentioned, I am originally from Cameroon, Central Africa, but I was raised in the DC area. I'm what you call a bank brat. My father worked for an international organization, the World Bank, lived in, like I said, grew up in DC, moved to Austin, Texas about seven years ago, been with Optim for the last nine years of my working career and I've had multiple roles, but currently my role is with the enabling technologies and processes, which means that I manage teams that support the platform of a lot of analytics products in Optim. Got it, all right, bank brat, that's a new one to me, I hadn't heard that, I love that, you're a bank brat. And proud of it, I can tell. Talk to me a little bit about the career path that you have navigated and what are some of your sort of tactical and also strategic recommendations for the audiences looking to grow their career in tech? So the interesting thing is I did not start in tech. My background is as an economist, I have a Bachelor's of Economics from the College of Montgomery. I also have a financial master's in public policy from American University. However, I did take some IT classes and as a kid, I'm probably dating myself a little bit but I programmed in DOS. So I was always excited by it and I had internships as a programmer that helped me pay for my master's degree and when I graduated, I just felt like I was having fun and I was getting paid very well and I was able to pay off my graduate schools. So I just stayed with tech. Love that, but it sounds like you had that interest from when you were quite young and as a lot of us end up in tech, we didn't start there originally. There's a lot of zigzaggy paths to get there. Sounds like you had that as well. What are some of your recommendations for people, either those that are in tech now or aren't who want to get into it and really expand and climb that ladder? So definitely, so one of the things to understand is tech could be many different things. One of the things could be programming, which I started doing and now dislike intensely. And then another thing could be like being in a business analyst in tech, getting the business requirements versus product management or even management. And what I would encourage people to do is really focus on what you feel happy doing, which for me is problem solving and collaborating and getting the right people together to solve very complex problems. And if you focus on that, then you'll find the role for you even in tech. I love that, problem solving is such an important skill to be able to have and to cultivate regardless of the industry that you're in. But I'd love to know a little bit more about some of the successes that you've had helping organizations to actually navigate their cloud journeys, their migration to cloud. As we've seen the last couple of years, a massive acceleration to the cloud that was really born out of the pandemic. Talk to me about some of the successes that you've been able to achieve. So the first, I guess most obvious thing is understanding the technology. What do you have at your disposal? What do you need for your team to succeed in the cloud or even on-prem? But what I've learned most in the last four to five years with the projects that I work on, whether it was migrating from a host data center to one that we owned ourselves or migrating from that data center to AWS recently was you really need to get the business organization engaged. And that's not just getting the sponsorship and getting them this to write that check, but really helping them understand how this journey to the cloud is a combined journey between both organizations, right? And they will be able to be more successful as well with us going to the cloud with improved processing, with revenue protection because there's more tools available with revenue expansion because now we can now expand faster, address client needs faster. So there's various different aspects of going to cloud that are more than just we're using the coolest technology. You're a problem solver. Has there, and one of the challenges with organizations and from a cloud migration standpoint that we often talk about is it's a cultural migration as well, which is really challenging to do for any type of organization regardless of industry. Do you have a favorite example where as the problem solver you came in and really helped the organization, the business side understand, be able to transform their cultural direction, understand why cloud migration can be such a facilitator of the business from a top line and a bottom line perspective. So from a bottom line perspective, I think the hardest thing for them to understand or what does not compute for them is you can't give them a set, this is what you're gonna cost in the cloud, right? Because the benefit of being in the cloud is being able to scale, shrink, et cetera. So that's one hurdle that we're still fighting to be on your path and candid, but from a top line perspective, what's been great is we've been able to ramp up more clients with the same input, right? So we haven't had to go out and procure more servers, more storage, hire more staff because we're in the cloud and we've actually been able to scale our teams as well because we incorporated the DevOps functions and we do not need a team to manage a data center anymore. So that they absolutely understood saving is ratified, but really just how do we get to market faster? How do we get to revenue faster and how do we get more revenue with the same pool of resources is something that they've really resonated with. Well, you're starting to speak their language. So to your point that resonates well, but there's so much productivity improvements, efficiencies to be gained by leveraging cloud computing that really hit the bottom line of an organization that businesses, if you put it in the right way and it sounds like as the problem solver you have, they understand the immense value and competitive advantage that cloud can bring to their organization and become sort of a, ah, the blinders are off, I get it. Exactly, you're just not trying to play with the latest toys. You're actually solving a business problem even before it happens. And that's the key. Solving business problems before they happen, being able to predict and forecast is huge for businesses, especially as we've seen the last couple of years, everybody racing to digital to pivot to survive now to be competitive. But if they don't do that and embrace that emerging technology suite, there's a competitor that's right back here that if they're more culturally willing and able to be more agile, they're gonna take the place of a competitive organization. So yeah, so it absolutely is a huge differentiator for organizations and it sounds like you've had some great successes there in helping organizations really navigate the challenges, the cultural challenges, but the benefits of cloud computing. I do wanna talk to you a little bit about in your expertise, diversity is something that is talked about in every industry. We talk about it in tech all the time, but there's still challenges there. What are your thoughts on diversity? What are you seeing and what are some of those challenges that are still sitting on the table? So I guess the first thing I would say is is multiple facets to diversity, right? The first one we always lean to is gender and race, but there's also diversity of thought. And being in the healthcare industry is very important for us to have a diversity of thought and experiences so that we can target a lot of these health equity issues that are ongoing. So that's one thing that we've been trying to do is making sure that I don't just have people that think like me on the team. And typically that also means not having people that look like me. So making sure that we have the right pipelines to hire for partnering with some of our vendors. AWS, for example, is a good one where they had avenues and they had nonprofits that they worked with and they connected us with. Some of our staff augmentation people also did the same thing, really just expanding the scope of where we're looking for talent. And that helps also bring that diversity of thought and the diversity of gender race into the fold. It is, and there's also, there's so much data. If we follow the data, and of course in tech, we're all about data, every company these days, regardless of industry, needs to be a data company. If we follow the data, we can see that organizations with, for example, females within the C-suite are far more profitable than those organizations that don't have that, even that element of diversity. So the data is demonstrating this tremendous business value, tremendous competitive advantage, faster time to market, more products and services that can be delivered if there is thought diversity among the entire organization, not just the C-suite. Exactly. And since we have an impact on what is being delivered as an engineering organization, we also need that in engineering, right? One of the things that's very keen right now is machine language and AI. If we don't have the right models, for example, then we either introduce bias or perpetuate bias. So we definitely need people on our teams as well that understand how these technologies work, how we can leverage them on our data sets so that we could run counter to this bias. And countering that bias is incredibly important, machine learning, AI. So driven by data, the volumes of data, but the data needs to be as clean and non-biased as possible. And that's a big challenge for organizations to undertake. Is there advice that you have for those folks watching who might be, I don't see me in this organization, I don't feel represented. How can I change that? Well, one would be to speak up, right? Even if you don't see you, apply for the job, right? And one of the things that we're trying to address even in the DEI space is making sure that our job descriptions are not introducing any biases so that people will eliminate themselves immediately, right? But really just, if you have this skill set and you feel like you can ramp up to the talent, then just apply for the job, talk to somebody. You do have a network, whether you realize it or not, so leverage that network. But really, like there's this expression that my kid taught me saying, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take, right? So if you don't try, you're not gonna make it by default. If you do try, there's a chance you make it, right? At the very least, you build a connection with someone who could potentially help you down the line. That is one of my absolute favorite sayings. You miss 100% of the shots that you don't take. So encouraging people to raise their hand. There are stats, data, speaking of data, we've been talking about that, to demonstrate that women are far less likely to apply for jobs like on LinkedIn, for example, unless they need 100% of the job requirements, which we all know are quite stringent and not necessary in a lot of cases. So I love your advice of just try. Raise your hand, ask the question. All that can see us know. And at the end of the day, what is that? It's a word, but can also be directional and really guiding for people on their journey to wherever that, if it's engineering, cloud engineering, DevOps, whatever that happens to be. Raise your hand, ask the question. And to your point, you have a network. It is there, open that up. There's so much potential for people that just raised, I think that's to raise their hand and ask the question. And the corollary to that is I would also encourage people who are in leadership roles to be strong allies, right? Like we need to be aware of what biases we might be introducing or candidates that we might be leaving on the table because we're being too stringent because we're not expanding our search, right? So definitely that's something that I've started doing about five, six years ago, shortly after I moved to Austin, which I kind of beat myself up about not having done before, is really contributing to that community, helping out being a mentor, being a coach, being a guide. Sometimes it's just reviewing somebody's resume. Other times it's talking to them about a role that I have and helping them map their current state to that role, but really just being an ally to everyone and anyone who wants to come into this space. I love that. And I have a feeling, Patty, that you're a great mentor and ally for those in your organization, across organizations and those out there that may not know yet. Patty can be an ally for me. I'd love to get your take in our final minutes on a couple of things. What's next in cloud from your perspective, the things that you've seen, what you've been able to achieve and how do you see your role evolving in the industry at Austin? So what's next in cloud? And we've talked about that a lot is data. How do we manage all this data? How do we catalog this data? How do we reuse this data? How do we ship this data? We have data in various different environments. We're a multi-cloud company. So how do we make sure that we don't have the same data everywhere? Or even if we do, how do we reconcile that? So data, data, data, right? And from data, get to information that we can monetize it and we can share it. So that's for me is really next step. I mean, we know the applications that we can build. We know the analytics that we can build. But if we don't have the right data, we're limiting ourselves. So that's definitely one aspect that I know that we wanna drive. And as far as my role, I was fortunate enough to be provided with the leadership of development of a platform for analytics, which yes, involves data. So I'm very excited about this, right? Cause that's next level for me. I've been typically in roles that protect revenue in a DevOps and operations role. And now I'm in a revenue generating role. And it has a shift in mindset, but I really appreciate it. And I'm really taking everything I've learned up to now as a DevOps team, I knew when the bad things came. So now I'm trying to prevent my team from pushing bad things down the pipe, right? So I'm just really excited about what's to come because there's so many opportunities for improving the products that we built. And I'm so excited to be a part of this platform. There are the horizon of opportunities is really endless, which is exciting. And to your point about data, like I mentioned for every company, whether it's your grocery store, a retailer, the postal service has to become a data driven company. Cause as consumers, we expect that. We bring that into our business lives and we expect to be able to transact in business as easily as we do on the consumer side. And that all requires organizations to not just have access to data, but to be able to build the right data infrastructure, to glean insights, to act on that, to feed the AI and ML models so that products services can get better, more personalized and meet the demands of the ever demanding consumer, which I know I'm one of them. I want to ask you one more final question. And that is, what do you think some of the biggest challenges have been with respect to tech innovation and the workforce over the past five years? What are some of those things that you've seen that you think we're on the right track moving forward to eliminate some of these? That is a good question. I think one of the biggest challenges for me has been not to remain in the status quo, right? Like not to do something because it's what we've been doing, but being in the cloud allows us with so many opportunities where we can fail fast, that let's give it a shot, let's do a quick sprint, let's figure out whether it is a possibility or not, eliminate it if it's not and then keep moving, right? Like we don't have the same development methodology before that we had to do three months, five months, six months. You can iterate in two week chunks, get it done, confirm your statement or negate it, but at the very least have an answer, right? So that for me is the biggest challenge. We're aware of the thinking we're just not doing. So I'd be very excited when we pivot from that and really start innovating because we have the time. Innovating because we have the time, as I mentioned, with the demand of consumers, whether it's consumer and on the personal side, business side, those demands are there, but the exciting thing is to your point, the innovations are there, the capabilities are there, the data is there. We have a lot of what we need to be able to take advantage of that. So it's going to be exciting to see what happens over the next few years. Patty, it's been such a pleasure having you on theCUBE today. Thank you so much for joining. You are clearly a leader in terms of women in the cloud. We appreciate what you're doing, your insights, your recommendations, and your insights as to what you see in the future. You've been a great guest. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me Lisa. My pleasure for Patty Jordan. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of women of the cloud brought to you by AWS, a special program series. We thank you so much for watching. Take care.