Dan McCune, Deputy Chief Information Officer at U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs joins Carolyn and Mark to discuss the transformative work happening at the VA. With millions of end users, Dan explains how his dedicated teams are working to make the VA better, faster, and safer for our veterans.

Episode Table of Contents

• [0:29] The Place to Go for Veterans Affairs
• [7:51] Veterans Affairs Approach Towards Modernization
• [14:53] The Forcing Function of Veterans Affairs
• [21:48] Veterans Affairs Makes Things Easy for Veterans
• [31:29] How AI Can Improve Veterans Affairs Services
• [40:44] The Next Big Leap in Technology

Episode Links and Resources

• Daniel McCune
• VA
• Competing in the age of AI
• Innovator’s Dilemma
• Atomic Habits
• The Power of full engagement
• Axis of Awesome

Carolyn:

Welcome to Tech Transforms, sponsored by Dynatrace. I'm Carolyn Ford. Each week, Mark Senell and I talk with top influencers to explore how the US government is harnessing the power of technology to solve complex challenges and improve our lives.

Carolyn:

Welcome to Tech Transforms. I'm Carolyn Ford here with Mark Senell. Hey Mark.

Mark:

Hey, Carolyn. Good to see you.

Carolyn:

You too. And we have finally nailed down the elusive Dan McCune, Deputy Chief Information Officer at the VA. And today we get to get Dan's insights on the VA's journey, implementing new capabilities and how federal IT will evolve over the next calendar year. So welcome to Tech Transforms Dan, how are you?

Daniel:

I am well, thank you, Carolyn. Thank you, Mark, for having me. Always excited to talk about modernization and transformation.

Mark:

Great to have you Dan.

Carolyn:

yes, and the VA really is leading the way in modernization and transformation. And where I'd like to start is user experience. I mean, this has been on everybody's mind lately, especially with the executive order calling for a better user experience. The thing that strikes me about the executive order, that it calls for a better user experience, but it doesn't really define what that means. It just kind of says do better. So I really would love to know how the VA is going about this.

Daniel:

So I love those kind of mandates because they let you define what success looks like. So I think for us, certainly there's a veteran facing component and I think you look at accessibility. So do veterans have access, easy access to the capabilities they need? And certainly we have moved to kind of a standardized portal with va.gov. So you just have one place to go to. We're very active in updating the user interface, adding new features all the time to va.gov. So that becomes a central portal for veterans.

Daniel:

The other component is mobile apps. We're doing a lot in the mobile space as well to get the capabilities to the veterans where they need it when they need it. So there's a biggest accessibility component to that. We're also looking at the employee experience as well. And I use the joke that we're nearly a $6 billion organization and we run on Excel, right? And we need better tools for our people to increase their productivity and we need better tools for our developers as they look to deliver products to our end users. So we're looking at not only the veteran experience, but also the employee experience, getting them the tools they need, where they need them.

Carolyn:

How are you measuring whether or not you're doing better? And I love that you're looking at it from both sides, like the employee side and amen to the Excel thing. 'Cause it is one of the banes of my existence. So maybe tell us how you measure improvement from an employee side and then also from your end user, which is the veteran.

Daniel:

Daniel:

Mark:

Dan, how does that relate to benchmarking? How do you guys look at that?

Daniel:

Mark:

Or is 4.8 out of five, that sounds great. How do you measure against what that means or are you where you need to be or want to be for the users?

Daniel:

So I think what's more important to us than a score is the trend, right? In which direction are we moving? So if we're 4.8 and we go to 4.7, that's a negative. If we're holding it, 4.8 is almost the highest score you can get. That's a relatively good rating. Anything close to five is good. So we're really looking at the trending and making sure that, especially when we release a new capability or a new mobile app, that that score, usually you look at the time of the release and any changes in the score and that's a pretty good indication of how much the users are using it and how they accept it.

Carolyn:

Do you have multiple apps then?

Daniel:

We do have multiple apps, yes. I don't have the account in front of me, but there are a number of apps available in both Apple Store and Google Store.

Mark:

I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, Dan, but you do have a pretty extensive background in application management, probably application development as well, correct?

Daniel:

Yes, but nobody lets me on the keyboard anymore. I did start out in development, prior service Air Force and then I got out and went to school, got my degree, and I've been coding ever since or working with developers ever since for about 25 years and moved my way from developer up to team lead to program management and eventually up to executive leadership. But I run developers today. We've got about 7,000 developers, both contractors and government running and building software for our veterans and for our users.

Mark:

That's an amazing number of folks actually. How does that part of the organization fit into what you guys are looking to do from user experience? How do you tie those together?

Daniel:

Carolyn:

The applications dating back that far, I'm surprised and-

Mark:

Oh, I'm not.

Carolyn:

yes, I know I shouldn't be right. But I guess when we say it out loud, it still shocks me a little bit. And then going back to your multiple applications, have you ever considered, or maybe you already do this, making all of the applications accessible from one portal or are they, they're totally separate services that wouldn't need to really be coordinated like that?

Daniel:

So that's part of the size and complexity of VA. We've got the largest integrated healthcare network in the nation, got the largest financial management system. We got these relatively large business units in VA that really are largely discreet. So I don't know that we have necessarily a challenge with accessibility of the applications. I think where we struggle a little bit is, and this may be your point, is let me make sure we're not buying or building the same app over and over again. Where where's your catalog that shows you what's already on your network so that you don't duplicate things. That's a struggle for us for getting better at inventory management of our software.

Carolyn:

Oh my gosh, I didn't even think of that. I mean, I always think about it from my perspective, how do I get to what I need to get to, but how do you track? How do you make sure you're not developing the same thing over and over?

Daniel:

So we organized a couple of years ago into product line management. We underwent a transformation. It kind of happened simultaneously with our DevOps transformation, but there was a need in the organization to change from project management to product management. And that is, for us, a big change. We have a lot of teams focused on scope, schedule, and cost while their customer was suffering and we were taking a victory lap. So we needed to really align with the customer and their outcomes and team up with them. And that's really what we're trying to do now under product management is team with the customer on their outcomes and not on scope, schedule and cost. So how does the customer measure success? What are their outcomes? That's what we want to drive and not necessarily any of those performance metrics that we used to use.

Daniel:

So that's been a huge transformation for us. And what it allows us to do also is group those products into product lines and industry might call those portfolios. We have larger groupings, which you call portfolios, but largely we organize our portfolios by customer, by the administration, so there's one aligned to help and then the product lines are aligned to customer groups so that we bring the products together and try to orient them to the customer and that allows us to have a better tracking of the inventory and better alignment to where the customer's vision is.

Mark:

I guess with the number of developers that you have, I'm somewhat answering my own question, but I was curious, is this expertise that you all rely on internally mainly at the VA to have that expertise or do you outsource a lot of that work?

Daniel:

So the truth of the matter is we're about, in my organization, we're about 85% vendors. So we have a lot of vendors that are doing the development and the technical work. And this is one of the areas where we're trying to grow. There's always a risk for us when we transition from one vendor to the other. Who's holding onto that critical information? How do we do knowledge transfer? So we are trying to hire more of those technical people and retain that tribal knowledge internally.

Mark:

Boy, that's a challenge. I mean-

Carolyn:

And I'm surprised that you say 85% is outsourced. Does that surprise you, Mark? The number of developers you guys have?

Mark:

It doesn't. I mean yes, the percentage surprise me, that's a huge organization, but it just seems like I hear from a lot of your colleagues across the government that that's a challenge. I mean, heck, we see it in private industry getting that kind of skillset and keeping them.

Carolyn:

yes, and I love what you said, Dan, about the product management and really focusing on what the end user needs. And I'm going to quote your deputy chief technology officer from an article that I just read, and it was about your health and benefits app, and he said that it was built with human-centered design from the beginning of its incarnation. And I was like, bingo. I mean, it's should be a no-brainer, but that's the mantra for better user experience, that we're thinking about how the end user needs to use it.

Daniel:

A hundred percent agree. yes, human center design, we say that's the center and that's the grounding of our application development. It's still a work in progress to fully realize that, but yes, we are focused on how do we improve the life of our veteran and how do we improve the experience of our employees internal?

Carolyn:

Daniel:

yes.

Carolyn:

So you're a year past that quote. What is your strategy? What have you seen changed since you've... Or has that been your strategy for a while? Or was that fairly new about a year ago?

Daniel:

So I think a year ago it was new for us. I think I said at the time it was gen two for us. So first it was kind of a forcing function. You must start moving to cloud. And we sent some benchmarks, this is how many apps we want to see in the cloud by this day. And so that was gen one. That was our first foray in the cloud, and that was mostly lift and shift. How do we take the apps that are in our data center today, OnPrem and move us to the cloud, still on the same Windows server, still on Windows servers, still on Linux virtualized servers in the cloud. And that helped. We saw, I think particularly when we got into COVID and our telehealth visits, veterans were going to the medical center, were used to going to the medical center for their healthcare and overnight that was turned off.

Daniel:

So we were able to scale our telehealth visits, I think by 6X almost in the same month because we had moved to cloud infrastructure, right, IAAS, infrastructure and cloud, infrastructure as a service. So we did that and we saw benefits there. But by moving the containers, we allow I think a further separation of the code from the infrastructure. And we allow our developers to focus on writing awesome codes, and we allow coders to build smaller modules that we can change asynchronously even real time without worrying about the platforms in the infrastructure. To me, this is kind of that maturity in DevOps. How do we get more mature? How do we get... I really think of better, faster, safer, how do we get better at delivering business outcomes? How do we get software in the end users faster and how do we make sure that software is safe in once the user is using it? And that means uptime, it means cyber, it means a lot of things, but containers helped us and are helping us get better, faster, and safer at delivering code.

Mark:

Dan, how are you guys progressing at moving some of those older legacy applications and things like that, that you mentioned are up to 20 years old, into the new world of containers?

Daniel:

So what I'm really super excited about is I said 30 to 40 years old. We actually have our core EHR, I believe was first written in the sixties and went into production in the seventies. So I think that makes it almost, boy, that's hard math. That's like 60 years old.

Carolyn:

yes. Yes.

Mark:

Do you just start over at that point?

Daniel:

Mark:

Do you just start over at that point?

Daniel:

That's a podcast all in itself. I don't think you want to go down that rabbit hole.

Mark:

Sorry.

Daniel:

What I will say is I'm excited. So it was written in MUMPS and this is one of those rare areas where we do have more government FTEs working on that MUMPS code. And some of them have been around, I'll tell you a funny story in a minute.

Carolyn:

Is that still a code language, MUMPS?

Daniel:

It is, and we're still doing active development on Vista today, and we have now moved Vista to the cloud. So we have our first instance of it in the cloud today. We did that in a pilot and now we're going back, we've tested the pilot, we know we can do it. It's a proof of concept. So now we're going to start to roll out the rest of our instances into Vista, and we are looking at containerizing that as well. So if we can do it to Vista, we can do it to almost anything. I think even now you can virtualize mainframes in the cloud and we do have mainframe systems today. We still have COBOL programmers, which leads me to my funny story. I was on a town hall meeting with one of my teams and they were sending off an 80-year-old COBOL developer who was retiring on that day. So we've got a great workforce that are extremely dedicated to the mission, and we're lucky to have them stick around that long.

Mark:

Those are use cases that should be put on like TED Talks because there aren't many organizations out there, commercial included, that are the size of the VA and what they're trying to do and to do some of those things, it's really, I mean, it's interesting to me to hear-

Carolyn:

yes, it's impressive.

Mark:

... some of these stories that you talk about. yes.

Carolyn:

I want to circle back to what you said with COVID when you guys had to move to telehealth and how quickly you were able to do it, which is just honestly mind-blowing. Did it improve healthcare to be able to offer telehealth care on the scale that you did? Did it improve healthcare for our veterans?

Daniel:

I'm not sure that I'm qualified to measure that, but I, here's what I can tell you. I can tell you that our veterans largely prefer telehealth visits now, and what we're seeing is a sustained volume much, much higher than it was pre-COVID. So our medical centers are opening, they're seeing patients every day now, but we still have maintained a telehealth visit level that has been fairly constant through the pandemic and post-pandemic. So I think that's a measure of their desire to have that option. And I do know that many of our veterans are in remote areas where they have to drive a long distance to get to a medical center or because of their physical disability, it's a challenge for them to go to a physical facility. So having telehealth as an option seems to be something that they want and are happy about.

Mark:

Probably a much more efficient and cost-effective way to deliver that kind of service, I got to imagine.

Daniel:

Yes, I would agree to that.

Carolyn:

Well, and maybe-

Mark:

Do you survey veterans to, I guess, to get that feedback?

Daniel:

We do have veteran surveys. I would say that's probably not going to come out of the IT shop, it's going to come out of one of our business offices. But yes, we do heavily survey the veterans. We want to know when we release new capabilities, is that something that's they like or they don't like? And we do use the mobile store score as one indication of that.

Carolyn:

When you scaled telehealth, did you see an increase in your veterans accessing healthcare?

Daniel:

I don't know that I have the numbers that tell me how many veterans were going into the... How many visits we had pre and post. I know that the number of telehealth visits, and I do have some numbers I can share with you, those went up exponentially and have stayed exponential. I think it's a little difficult to compare apples to apples because our veteran population and the demographics are changing as well. So it's kind of a moving target. But I will say that it has been a benefit. We are probably seeing more veterans because they're less... If they're remote, if they've got physical disabilities, they may not have come into a medical center, where now they do have an option they didn't before, with televisits, so I would expect our visits are actually increasing overall.

Carolyn:

That would be my assumption.

Mark:

Well, the more people you can get to, the more veterans you can help and get the care, which in the past has been criticisms, I guess, not being able to get to everybody, right?

Daniel:

Exactly. Yep.

Mark:

Caroline, do you want to poke at this container subject anymore?

Carolyn:

You know I do. I want to circle back to the containerization. I'm curious, since you made the statement that this is your second gen of the containerization, where are you now a year later, and does it tie into the user experience effort that you guys have?

Daniel:

So I will say cloud definitely ties into the user experience or there is a tie to the user experience. I think we focus on accessibility, and again, when we're talking about the size and scale of VA, we're talking about thousands, sometimes millions of users. And we talk about the difference between three nines and four nines or five nines. There's a big difference in having something that's up two nines versus three nines, and maybe a little less, but three and four.

Daniel:

But that's really been a focus of our new CIO is to make sure that our systems do have the appropriate uptime and our customers can tell us a monetary number for every hour of downtime. So one of our key systems, it costs them $12,000 for every hour of downtime of their critical system. And when they're down, that means more overtime, so they have to pay to catch up. It also means slower response times or wait times for the veterans. So there's a very close tie to the veteran experience, the employee experience, and how efficiently we're using our money. And I tie that to cloud in availability and certainly our move to cloud has helped.

Carolyn:

So-

Mark:

Interesting. yes.

Carolyn:

So what are your top priorities this year? What's gen three?

Daniel:

Well, I'm not sure. We're probably early in gen two, but I can tell you what our priorities are for this year, and we really have four. And our CIO is kind of focused on two things and primarily one is vision-driven execution. And this gets at what I talked about earlier, transforming into a product organization, pivoting away from being order takers to being partners and leaders in where the products are going today. How do we partner with the customer to meet their objective? How do we create a technical vision to help get them there? We don't care if we're buying software or we're coding software, we're integrating or configuring software. Ultimately is how do we bring it to bear to solve their objective or meet their objectives? And so the other one is operational excellence, and we invest in this every single morning. So for us as IT leaders, we have an ops call every single morning for a half hour, and we go through the major incidences that are open or new ones that came up during the night.

Daniel:

And given our size and complexity, there's always something to talk about. And we use those as a training mechanism to talk about operational resiliency and uptime. We talk about did you have monitoring in place to detect and alert you or did you rely on the end user to create a ticket? And so we focus a lot on that operational excellence and use that as a training ground for changing our culture. And this is really about DevOps. Dev, we get that operational side under understanding how to resolve tickets, but making sure that we're detecting those early using tools like Dynatrace and Splunk and other things to get that early detection, that early signal, and then raise events. The other one is delightful user experience. We talked about 40 year old or 50 year old or 60 year old applications and modernizing those with a modern user experience. And then people excellence. Our fourth one is around our people and creating career pathways for them, providing cross-training for them. We really want VA to be the best place to work. And by the way, we're hiring.

Carolyn:

Good to know. Good to know.

Daniel:

We're hiring IT people.

Carolyn:

And you keep them until they're 80, we know that too.

Daniel:

Exactly. That's the career plan. In 20 years-

Mark:

Well that's a good employee experience.

Carolyn:

That's right. Okay, so did we get all four? Was the fourth one people excellence or are we missing-

Daniel:

yes. Vision driven execution, operational excellence, delightful end user experience, and people excellence.

Carolyn:

I love that. Delightful end user experience. How often do we get that when we go online and have to do something with, sorry, government applications?

Mark:

Well, you rarely hear the word delightful used, which is nice to hear.

Carolyn:

yes.

Mark:

yes, it's cool.

Carolyn:

But that is your goal.

Mark:

yes. So Dan, recently the omnibus spending bill was passed and in the highlights, I guess the VA was called out as being allocated funds to help expand current technical capabilities and things like that. Can you talk a little bit about some of the current capabilities that you're looking to expand, I guess, and leverage some of that additional help?

Daniel:

So today, so first off, PACT Act adds what we call presumptive conditions, which means we're worried about veterans that were exposed to burn pits and toxic exposure during the Gulf War and post 9/11, what we basically do is we assume that a veteran, if they have certain health conditions, they served in a certain theater at a certain time, that it is service connected. That's a big change for us to make those presumptions. We are seeing and expecting about a 70% increase in claim volume coming in. And we also-

Carolyn:

Because you've come out and said, "We're accepting that if you have these health issues, we're not going to question it. We are going to assume that they're related to your service."

Daniel:

Yes and no. What we've done is expanded the eligibility criteria for veterans. So more veterans are going to be accepted and more veterans are going to get benefits and as many as 70% more. And we're also seeing an increase in the complexity. So in order for us to come to these conclusions, we have to use more of the veterans background data. So where did they serve? What were their dates of service, what geographical locations were they're in? So the complexity is gone up and I think about both incremental modernization and then disruptive innovation. We have to get better and faster at doing what we do today. We've actually already started working on system updates back in December. Some of those presumptive cases we're able to process today. We've got a timeline to on onboard more and more of those presumptive cases over the next year.

Daniel:

But we absolutely have to get faster. We're seeing on average, about a 15% increase in efficiencies year over year as we continue to improve these claims processing systems. 15% over the next year is not going to be enough. We have to really accelerate the automation and the software that we're using. And that's where I think you start talking about disruptive, we'll see incremental improvements this year, but we really need to look at the veterans journey a little differently. And today we're very reactive. We wait for the veteran to file the claim, and then we react to that. We bring evidence and we come to a conclusion.

Daniel:

We have a lot of the veteran's data, and if we can get that data and piece it together in a holistic view, we believe that we can ascertain that veteran's eligibility from the data we have and proactively reach out to the veteran and let them know, "You qualify for these benefits." That's transformational. That's a very, very different user experience than what we have today. The technology is there to make that happen, but it takes resources, it takes funding in order to be able to do that.

Mark:

Are there any specific types of technologies that you could speak to about how you're doing some of that?

Daniel:

yes, I think this won't sound particularly creative, but big data analytics and AI. I think we need ways, we have a lot of data about the veterans today, but it tends to be siloed and stored in separate databases. We need holistic ways to look at that data and make inferences from that. So data warehouses, data lakes, data lake houses, all of those things are important techniques. And then I think the AI on top of that, we're a little early in adopting AI, at least at scale in VA, but I do think that AI brings some of those capabilities to switch to that proactive mode.

Carolyn:

Honestly, this is why I love doing this podcast because what you just talked about, you guys are taking care of the people that took care of us in a way that I think is unprecedented. I have never heard of taking this data that some of these guys probably don't even know they were around toxic shit, and you're going to tell them-

Mark:

We'll have to bleep that out.

Daniel:

We'll have to bleep that out.

Carolyn:

But I mean, you are going to reach out to them and say, "Hey, here's how you could have been affected. Here's what you're eligible for." This is what technology...

Mark:

It's great to hear.

Carolyn:

yes.

Mark:

It's really great to hear. yes.

Carolyn:

yes. This is fantastic. So well actually, Mark, we're coming up on our time as always. Do you have any other questions for Dan?

Mark:

Not at this time. I'm sure we'll need you to come back on and do another podcast with us, Dan.

Daniel:

All right. Deal.

Mark:

yes.

Carolyn:

Well, and I want to give you the last word, Dan. Is there anything else that you would like to share with our listeners?

Daniel:

I think we've covered a lot of ground. I probably wouldn't add anything to that.

Carolyn:

I would agree. I am going to give a shout-out to the Disabled Veterans Winter Sports Clinic, I think I got that title right, that's coming up. Such a fun activity. If you go out online and look it up, some of the videos that are out there of the veterans are just really fun to watch and that's coming up and you can support that and we're actually supporting it, and it's important and really fun. So shout-out there. And then I want to move to our tech talk questions, which are like really-

Mark:

More lighthearted.

Carolyn:

yes, they're fun questions. It's how I get my reading list. So I will start with the first one because I'm always curious what our guests are reading and watching. And it doesn't have to be work related, it can be, but what do you listen to, what do you read, watch?

Daniel:

I try to have... So I've got both the Audible and the Kindle subscription, so I try to read and listen one at the same time. I just finished-

Carolyn:

Wait, wait, wait. You listen to it while you're reading it with your-

Daniel:

No, no, no, no, no. Not at the same time. Not the same, same time.

Carolyn:

Okay, got it. Got it, got it.

Daniel:

And then I also try to get in some formal education. So I did Harvard Business School that wrapped up this winter. Actually, it was ironic, I did competing in the age of AI and that finished right about the time that chatGPT kind of went mainstream. So I've been very interested in AI and learning that we've got actually AI tools all around us. We don't necessarily appreciate the power and the availability that we have, but there's a lot of toolkits around this that we can use. I just finished up the Innovators Dilemma. A very, very, again, timely book as we start to look at PACT Act and how we do disruptive innovation there. I am reading Atomic Habits right now.

Carolyn:

Oh, that's a good one. I like that one.

Daniel:

You like it?

Carolyn:

yes, I do.

Daniel:

I'm in the middle of it.

Carolyn:

So what do you think so far?

Daniel:

It's powerful to think that that change is driven by the habits that we have, and then the ability to engineer those habits, I think is powerful.

Carolyn:

Yes. I changed some of my behaviors based on recommendations from that book. Habit stacking is one of them that I started doing.

Daniel:

I like habit stacking.

Carolyn:

Well, I know I've done it in the past, but I started to be more conscious about it. When I wanted to add things into my life, I'd do it through habit stacking.

Mark:

What is that?

Carolyn:

Dan?

Daniel:

Oh, Carolyn, you're the one that brought it up. Actually, I just finished that part in the book. I was super excited about that. I ran home and looked at... Did an inventory of all my habits and looked for connections between them.

Carolyn:

Right.

Mark:

Oh, boy.

Carolyn:

So when you already have something that you do every day, like you brush your teeth every day, and you want to add a habit that you maybe could stack before or after, or even during brushing your teeth, that's habit stacking. Something that is already ingrained in your life and you want to create a new behavior, a good way to do it is to marry it to something that you've already got going on.

Mark:

I'm definitely going to read that.

Carolyn:

I thought it was really good. He had really good examples. And then when you get to the end, at least I feel like he does a summary, a wrap up of all the things that you can do to improve your behaviors.

Daniel:

I'm looking forward to finishing it. I do find that energizing, and then I'm reading, or I just finished The Power of Full Engagement. And I think it's interesting to think about energy management as opposed to time management. I have definitely changed some of my... Taken an inventory of those things that give me energy and those things that drain energy from me. And the biggest thing for me was recognizing things that I didn't value were actually brought me energy. And so I now value them more.

Carolyn:

Oh, like what? Like sleeping?

Daniel:

Going for walks.

Carolyn:

Really?

Daniel:

yes. It's not here, I actually have a keyboard in my office, and I've always wanted to learn how to play the piano, but I'm a tech guy, and so I didn't value that, I didn't give time to that. But I'm teaching myself how to play a keyboard, and I find that learning a new thing brings me energy. And so I have time in my morning now every day where I play on the keyboard. And there's actually an interesting YouTube about this guy that there's a axis of... We're way down in a tangent now.

Carolyn:

That's what these questions are for. This is my favorite part of the show.

Daniel:

There's a group called Axis of Awesome, and they did a comedy bit around four chord songs. So basically they said, if you learn four chords, you can play most of the pop songs ever written. And they demonstrated in about four minutes, they do little ditties from a whole bunch of pop songs. So a guy followed that up with this other video that said, "You can learn any new skill in about 20 hours." So most of us will have the reference of 10,000 hours, which-

Carolyn:

That's what I was just going to say.

Daniel:

Which is mastery. Right? It only takes 20 hours to gain competency with something. And so I'm practicing almost 20 hours on the keyboard and see what I can play after 20 hours.

Carolyn:

What hour are you at?

Mark:

I wonder if your coders would agree with that.

Carolyn:

Oh no. No kidding. But how many hours are you in Dan?

Daniel:

I am at about 14 hours.

Carolyn:

Ooh, okay. So when we do a show with you again in six months, 12 months, you can play, are you going to sing too or just play?

Daniel:

I'm going to play Tchaikovsky for you.

Carolyn:

Yes.

Mark:

Can be a recital.

Carolyn:

That's right.

Daniel:

That is never going to happen.

Carolyn:

All right, Mark, you get the next one and the last one, so we can-

Mark:

Sure.

Carolyn:

... let Dan go.

Mark:

Okay. Real quickly, what do you think the next big leap in technology's going to be?

Daniel:

So with a developer's background, I do look at development tools and languages and the developer workload. So we've gone from, in the past, it's really been going on for decades, we've gone from easier to better languages, we've gone to automated DevOps, we've gone to low-code, no-code, things like RPA, and now really to AI, augmented software engineering. So the convergence of these technologies is creating coding easier and hopefully addressing some of the labor constraints we have around engineering. So there's never enough developers. We've transformed the application landscape, and I think we're changing accessibility to developers and development skills. So hopefully we're going to see that continue and accelerate and developer productivity go up.

Mark:

You've given some of the most interesting answers of any guest that we've had. I'm telling you these are really different-

Daniel:

Is that good or bad?

Mark:

... takes and some... No, some excellent, really good stuff.

Carolyn:

Well, it's interesting because they're from your point of view, so I mean, what I wish for in technology is tele transportation. So yours is a lot more practical and reachable.

Mark:

What do you wish for?

Carolyn:

yes. Oh, yes. What do you wish for?

Mark:

If you had a blank slate, what's on your technology wishlist?

Daniel:

Wow. I was going to say my watch. I got a Garmin watch. I want the new Garmin watch.

Carolyn:

That's your big wish?

Daniel:

No, I know that's not, I didn't go big, did I? Let's see. I do think transportation's a big one. I do think, and so I'm in Austin, Texas. Transportation here is horrendous, and we've tried trains and they're talking about tunnels. I do think, especially with AI cars or with cars being automated now, there are some opportunities that haven't been there in the past that at least the technology is there. Other things need to catch up to that. But I do think transportation could be the next, and I really do think that AI in the hands of users, so if you've got Office 365, you've got power automate and power apps on your desktop today, and that provides an awful lot of capability. I think we're going to see AI take us, I think we're going to see things in the next couple years we can't even imagine around AI. And I'm super excited to see that happen. I'm excited to live in the time that I live because we're seeing amazing things.

Mark:

That's a great answer.

Carolyn:

yes. I'm just going to say, Dan, me and you, we need teleportation. That's it.

Daniel:

I'll sign up for that.

Carolyn:

Beam me up, Dan.

Daniel:

I'll be a pilot with you.

Carolyn:

Okay. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us and for your insights and for entertaining some of my questions. We appreciate your time.

Daniel:

Thank you. Appreciate it.

Mark:

Thank you so much. Great to meet you. Look forward to talking again soon, Dan. Thank you.

Daniel:

Thanks all.

Carolyn:

All right. Bye.

Carolyn:

Thanks for joining Tech Transforms sponsored by Dynatrace. For more Tech Transforms, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.