(soft music) >> We're in Las Vegas at The Venetian for our continued coverage here of re:Invent '22, AWS's big show going on. Great success off to a wonderful start. We're in the Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture. And we're going to talk about public health and the cloud, how those have come together in the great state of North Carolina. Charles Carter is going to help us do that. He's assistant secretary for technology services with the state of North Carolina's Department of Health and Human Services. Charles, good to see you. Thanks for joining us here on "theCUBE". >> Thank you very much for having me. >> Yeah, thanks for making the time. So first off, let's talk about what you do on the homefront before what you're doing here and where you're going. But in terms of kind of what your plan has been, what your journey has been from a cloud perspective and how you've implemented that and where you are right now in your journey. >> Sure, so we started. When I got there, we didn't have a cloud footprint at all. There was a- >> Host: Which was how long ago? >> I got there in 2016, so about six years. >> Host: Six, seven years, yeah. >> Yeah, five, six years. So anyways, we started off with our first module within our Medicaid expansion. And that was the first time that we went into the cloud. We worked with AWS to do our encounter processing system. And it was an incredible success. I think the ease of use was really kind of something that people weren't quite ready for. But it was really exciting to see that. And the scalability, to be able to turn that on and cover the entirety of North Carolina was awesome. So once we saw that and get a little taste of it, then we really wanted to start implementing it throughout DHHS. And we marshaled in a cloud-only cloud-first strategy where you had to actually get an exemption not to go to the cloud. And that was a first for our state. So that was really kind of the what launched us. But then COVID hit. And once COVID came in, that took us to a new level. COVID forced us to build technologies that enabled a better treatment, a better care, a better response from our team. And so we were able to stand up platforms in 48 hours. We were able to stand up COVID vaccine management systems in six weeks. And none of that would've been possible without the cloud. >> So forced your hand in a way because all of a sudden you've got this extraordinarily remote workforce, right, and people trying to- And you're doing different tasks that were totally unexpected, right, prior to that. What kind of a shock to the system was that from I get from an IT perspective? >> Yeah, so from a state government perspective, for example, you never hear you have all the money you need and you have to do it quickly. It just doesn't work like that. But this was a rare moment in time where you had this critical need. The entire country and our state population was kind of on edge. How do we move through this? How do we factor our lives into this new integration? What is this virus? Is it spreading in my county, in my city, my zip code? Where is it? And that kind of desperation really kind of focused everybody in on build me technologies that can get me the data that I need to make good healthcare decisions, good clinical decisions. And so that was our challenge. Cloud enabled it because it can scale so quickly. We can set up things, we can exchange data. We can move data around a lot easier. And the security is better from our perspective. So that COVID experience really kind of pushed us, you know, if you will, out the door. And we're never going back because it's just too good. >> Yeah, was that the aha moment then in a way because you had to do so much so fast and before capabilities that maybe you didn't have or maybe hadn't tapped? >> Yeah, yeah. >> I mean what was the accelerant there? Was COVID that big, or was it somebody who had to make a decision to say, this is where we're going with this, somebody in your shoes or somebody with whom you work? >> Yeah, no, I mean cloud at the end of the day, we knew that in order to do what we needed to do we couldn't do it on-prem. It wasn't an option. So if we wanted to build these capabilities, if we wanted to bring in technologies that really brought data to our key, our governor, our secretary, to make good decisions on behalf of our residents in North Carolina, then we were going to have to build things quickly. And the only way you can do that is in the cloud. So it was when they came back and said, "We need these things," there's only one answer. That's a good thing about technology. It's pretty binary, so it was either go with what we had, which wasn't adequate, or build to what we knew we could do and pretty short order. And because of that, we were able to actually usher in a huge expansion of cloud footprint within DHHS. And now we've actually been able to implement it in other departments simply because of our expertise. And that's been a huge asset for the state of North Carolina as a whole. >> So what's your measuring stick then for value in terms of identifying benefit? 'Cause it's not really about cost. This is about service, I assume, right? >> Right. >> So, you know, how do you quantify the values and the benefits that you're deriving from this migration over to the cloud? >> So from our perspective, it hits several different areas. I mean, you can start in security. We know that if we're in the cloud the tools that can manage and give us visibility in the cloud are 10 times better than an on-prem environment. And so if we can take a lot of these legacy systems and move them to the cloud, we'll be in a better security posture. So we have that piece of it. The other part of it is the data aspect of it, being able to- We're 33 divisions strong, right? We have a large footprint. We have a lot of siloed data elements. And cloud allows us to start integrating those data sets in a much more usable fashion so that we can see that if Charles Carter's in one area in division, a specific division with DHHS, is he somewhere else? And if he is somewhere else, then how do we provide a better clinical care for that individual? And those are conversations that we can't really have if we don't move to the cloud. So those types of- And of course there's always the OKRs, the actual measurements that you apply to things that we're doing. But at the end of the day, can we get the requirements from our business partners, bring those requirements to bear in technology, and really enable the indoctrination of these requirements throughout our clinical and healthcare kills? >> What about they're always pillars here, right? Governance, huge pillar, security, huge pillar, especially in your world, right? >> Yeah. >> So making that move over to the cloud and still recognizing that these are essentials that you have to have in place, I wouldn't say adjustments, but what kind of, I guess, recognition have you had toward that and making sure that you're still very true to those principles that are vital in the terms of public health? >> It is a great question because our secretary at the time and our governor, Roy Cooper, were very focused on enabling transparency. We had to be very transparent with what we were doing because the residents in North Carolina were just really kind of, "What's going on?" It was a scary time for a lot of us. So transparency was a key element towards our success. And in order to do that, you've got to have proper security. You got to have proper governance. You've got to have proper builds within technology that really enable that kind of visibility. One of the things that we did very early on was we set up a governance structure for our cloud environments so that as we wanted to and stand up an easy-to environment or we wanted to do some sort of work within a cloud or stand up in a different environment, we were able actually to set up a framework for how do you introduce that. Are you doing it correctly? Do you have the proper security on it? Do you have the funding for it? Like all the steps that you need to really kind of build into the scaffolding around a lot of these efforts we had to put in place and pretty quickly to get them going. But once we did that, the acceptance and the adoption of it was just tremendous. I mean, it was a light on for all of our business partners 'cause they understood I can either build on-prem, in which case I won't be able to get what I want in any kind of reasonable time period. Or I can build on cloud. And I can have it in some cases in 48 hours. >> Right, tomorrow. >> Yeah, exactly. >> You know, it was a huge difference. >> So where are you there? I mean, this is just not like a really big old lift and shift and we're all done and this is great. Cloud's taken care of all of our needs. Where are you in terms of the journey that you're undertaking? And then ultimately where do you want to go, like how far? What kind of goals have you set for yourself for the next two, three years down the road? >> Yeah, so this is an exciting part because we have actually- Like I mentioned earlier, we are a cloud-first cloud-only strategy, right? There's no reasons for us to be on-prem. It's just a matter of us kind of sunsetting legacy systems and bringing on cloud performance. We hope to be a 60% of our applications, which we have over 400 applications. So it's pretty large footprint. But we're wanting to migrate all of that to the cloud by 2025. So if we can achieve that, I think we'll be well on our way. And the momentum will carry forward for us to do that. We've actually had to do a reorganization of our whole IT structure. I think this is an important part to maintain that momentum because we've reorganized our staff, reorganized ourselves so that we can focus more on how do you adopt cloud, how do you bring in platforms which are all cloud-based, how do you use data within those systems? And that has allowed us to kind of think differently about our responsibilities, who's accountable for what, and to kind of keep those, that momentum going. So we've got some big projects that are on right now. Some of them are lift and shift, like you mentioned. We have a project with kind of a clumsy, monolithic system. It's called (indistinct). We're trying to migrate that to the cloud. We're in the process of doing that. And it's an excellent demonstration of capability once we pull that off. And then of course any new procurement that we put out there no one's making anything for on-prem anymore. Everyone's making their SaaS products for cloud-based experiences. Or if we're going to build or just use integrators then we'll build that in house. But all of it's based on cloud. >> And you mentioned SaaS. How much of this stuff are you doing on your own? And how much are you doing through managed services? >> Yeah, so like I mentioned, we have over 400 applications. So we had a pretty large footprint, right? >> Big, it's huge, right. >> So we're only who we are, and we can only build so much. So we're kind of taking- We did a application rationalization effort, which kind of identified some threats to our systems. Like maybe they're older things, FoxPro, kind of older languages that we're using. And in some cases we got people who are retiring. And there's not many people who can support that anymore. So how do we take those and migrate them to the cloud, either put them on a Salesforce or ServiceNow or Microsoft Dynamics platform and really kind of upgrade those systems? So we're in the process of kind of analyzing those elements. But yeah, that's kind of the exciting launch, if you will, of kind of taking the existing visibility of our applications and then applying it to what we're capable of with the cloud. >> And if you had advice that you could give to your colleagues who are in public health or just in public, the public sector- And your resources, they're finite. This is kind of what you have to deal with. And yet you have needs, and you're trying to stay current. You've got talent challenges, right? You've got rev or spending challenges. So if you could sit down your colleagues in a room and say, "Okay, this has been our experience. Here's what I would keep an eye out for," what kind of headlights would you beat for them? >> Yeah, so I think the biggest aha that I'd like to share with my contemporaries out there is that you've got a great ability to lower your costs, to excite your own personnel because they want to work on the new stuff. We've actually set up a whole professional development pathway within our organization to start getting people certified on AWS, certified on other platforms, to get them ready to start working in those environments. And so all of that work that we're been doing is coming together and allowing us to maintain the momentum. So what I'd recommend to people is, A, look at your own individual staff. I don't think you need to go outside to find the talent. I think you can train the talent that you have interior. I think you've got to aggressively pursue modernization because modernization enables a lot more. It's less expensive. It enables quicker adoption of business requirements and modern business requirements. And then lastly, focus on your data sharing because what you're going to find in the platforms and in the clouds is that there is a lot more opportunities for data integrations and conjoining disparate data sources. So if you can do those elements, you'll find that your capabilities on the business side are much more, much greater on the other end. >> Don't be scared, right, jump in? (laughing) >> Definitely don't be scared. Don't be, the water's warm. (host laughing) Come on in, you're fine, you're fine. (laughing) >> No little toe dipping in there. You're going to dive into the deep end, let her rip. >> Exactly, just go right in, just go right in. >> Well, it sounds like you've done that with great success. >> I'm very happy with it. >> Congratulations on that. And wish you success down the road. >> Thank you very much, I appreciate it. >> Yeah, thank you, Charles. All right, back with more. You are watching theCUBE here in Las Vegas. theCUBE of course the leader, as you know, in tech coverage. (soft music)

from Las Vegas accepting the signal from the noise it's the queue coverage interconnect 2016 brought to you by IBM now your home John Murray had named a lot day ok welcome back everyone we are here live in Las Vegas for exclusive coverage of IBM interconnect 2016 this is the cube Silicon angles flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal annoys I'm John for rhythmic O's Dave a lot a and we're excited to have our youngest guest we've ever had on the Cuban our six-year seventh year doing it 10 Maybach che who's the star of the show coding since age 5 welcome to the cube hello ok so how was the first time you wrote code well actually I was 5 and I started with FoxPro programming on a really old computer forgot who manufactured it in general with my dad's help alright so how do you feel with all these old people around you like us learning back in the old days you're the next generation so how do you feel about all this these sub celebrity status you're famous on YouTube a lot of people love your videos you've been great teacher yeah I love to help people so it feels great yeah was that what was the how many videos have you posted now I have around 80 videos 88 yes all sort of sort of self-help yeah programming here's how to yes sure and and your community is growing I presume yeah is your dad a programmer uh he he does work as a programmer yet uh-huh so is that how you first yes my first got into programming but now sometimes that you can teach my dad programmers do for iOS teaching the teachers ok so when did you surpass your dad in the in the programming really all when the Iowa my first iOS app t-tables which helps you learn multiplication tables was accepted into the iOS App Store and so right after that I started using the Internet as a tool to basically learn programming and at that point I just started learning more and more yeah and you like teaching people too so not only do you develop you also are teaching folks and you like that yes yes all right so when was the last time you push code this morning today kind of clock morning yeah oxi agile a little update for us Tim it allows you to ask another question from the result page I said what's cool about the the current stuff you're seeing here are you playing with Watson at all's Watson integrate actually I use Watson in the latest app that I've developed which I was actually presenting yesterday at the cloud Expo it's called a stem ray and so basically it you can ask it person or organization questions like who is the CEO of IBM and it should be able to answer them and so it does use IBM Watson's api's in this case relationship abstraction and natural language classifier are you using bluemix at all yes absolutely I love what makes it's really easy to use the Watson api's containers and stuff yeah I like it was a developer you feel like the services the richness of the services in bluemix so to satisfy your your general needs and yes what what more would you like to see out of bluemix well mainly out of bluemix nothing that i can think off the top of my head but for watson i really want more sort of api's don't have anything in general in specific that i can think of but more IBM watson api's would be great so you've also done some development for wearables right Apple watch is that right or yes I have developed apps that are actually I have a TGS app it's a number guessing game app for the Apple watch and iPhone on the App Store I also have developed for Mac OS X but I don't have any apps on the App Store for that yet what are you what do you think about the wearables thing is remember when Google glass came out John actually went and got with the first Google glass of your son Alec was wearing it as graduation and but they were sort of you know kind of not they were sort of awkward you know it didn't and people said I don't know you have an apple developer Kate was pretty weak at the time it wasn't coming I thought was a great first version and I love it it's it's sandbox stuff but so what do you what do you think about you know wearables the development environment yeah you encouraged about the future of them do they have a long way to go give us your thoughts on that Tanmay well to begin first of all on the Apple watch I love pretty much the portability of these sorts of devices and there's one more thing but I want sort of like the Apple watch and the Google glass it would be best if there were independent devices instead of connected to your phones they could be sort of like a Mac and an iPhone they can share data with each other but they shouldn't have to depend on each other that's one thing that I'm not too much of a fan of about them so I mean if my inference is that's a form factor related you know you can only do so much on the problem on a watch but do you I mean I know there's a lot going on in Silicon Valley with the future of the way in which we you know communicate I just wonder as a young person right you you've always been had a device like this right you're your disposal but it seems to me that using our thumbs to communicate to these devices is doesn't seem to be the right way asking the AI question yeah so exactly is is the future you know artificial intelligence what do you envision as a as a developer how are we going to communicate with these devices in the future well first of all let me just tell you our computers sort of power is not with natural language it's with math because of our human is better at sort of talking to people like we are right now not at sort of mass or live it would be harder for a human to do math but a computer can do math easier natural language you can't do whatsoever and so first of all in order to program in even asked anime it would take a lot of code and so what I can really think is we the next I don't know how many years it's going to take a long time to get to the sort of really powerful questions answering systems that can answer with a hundred percent accuracy not even hey we could do that so Tama you've been using the internet for outreach and in building a community to teach people than great the next step is you can't be everywhere so you use the internet but what about virtual reality oculus rift have you played with any of this stuff not yet but I plan on soon yes you you enticed by that yes I'm specifically excited about microsoft hololens the virtual Tanmay on the whiteboard you could be everywhere that way all right so what's the coolest language right now for you I mean I see your we heard Swift on stage you did the iOS app water what are some of the cool things well first of all I've developed as Ted may in Python and Java for the backend and HTML for the interface and PHP for the interface and back-end bridge but the most interesting language that I've ever used really is Swift huh first of all second I'd say as a close second is Java because it's portability you create something on Linux and it would almost easily work on Windows and Mac as well Chavez Chavez a good language is good for heavy lifting things yeah how about visualization are you thinking anything about rich media at all and visualization uh I'm I'll get the data you have the Swift absolute the mobile yes visualizing other media techniques with the T with math and with your truth your developer is what are you using for visualization graphics o for graphics well I'm not actually a graphic designer I'm trying to focus all more on the programming side of things but I do develop the user interface for example I actually had another app except to the a few days ago a goal setting app for which I had the same user interface then sort of graphics themselves I don't see usually hardcore fans but use you know the libraries yes 10 May you mentioned the Swift was your favorite language what's so alluring about it from a developer's perspective the syntax is great and it's really powerful which is what I love about Swift so it's easy and and powerful yes exactly so um you from Toronto right um sorry Toronto yeah how we say it right so is there a big developer community there I know there is a growing one but sorry uh well I have I don't really meet with people in person and develop together I'm more of an independent developer right now but I do definitely help people want to one on my youtube channel with really any questions or problems they have if you'd like to see my YouTube channel of course it's called Tim live action I get to answer yes when it's called Tim me back she which is my name yes okay can google it up and you'll find it I teach stuff like computing programming algorithms Watson math and science and so yeah so actually if you like an example a few days ago actually another app called speak for handicap was accepted into the iOS App Store and I developed that with von Clement which is one who is one of my subscribers and so yeah it took us a few months of hard work and we were able to even epic n' speak for handicaps it allows them to essentially speak i'm going to ask you the question so a lot of moment I have four kids to her about your age they are naturally attracted to programming it's fun it's like sports you know it's really fun for them and so that but a lot of them don't know how to way to start you had you were lucky you fell right into it five well you get that a lot of us knows you get a lot of questions on your on your YouTube channel around that you people excited for your next video but for the folks that are now seeing you and want to get in it might be a little scared can you share what you've learned and what advice would you give folks what I recommend is start out slow start doing some stuff in programming don't immediately get into the harder sort of thing start with really simple applications and don't develop when you need to develop you want to essentially programming things randomly for example I learned Swift like pretty much entirely due to the fact that first of all I'm writing a book on it it's for iOS app developers for beginners and also because I would just programming stuff randomly I didn't wait for me to need to programming something or for if I wanted to make an iOS app an order program in something for one day trader prime number checker the mastery number generator stuff like that and so just randomly anything I times it'll create a YouTube video on it to help people you could also use again a YouTube channel as sort of a place to learn programming and so use the internet as resource every developer has to pull those late nights and sometimes you pups to pull an all-nighter have you pulled an all-nighter coding that's not happy about that trouble without stuck he was doing it into the covers but also developers also struggle sometimes on the really hard problem and then the satisfaction of cracking the code or breaking through can you give us an example where you were pulling your hair out you were really focused on the problem you were kind of thrashing through it and you made it through yes actually any I could give you but the one that I remember most is during a Stanley's development at first I was using the multi processing library in Python in order to send multiple queries to relationship extraction at once but then what happened I don't know whether it was a memory management issue or something but after let's say five queries the sixth one will be painfully slow then I tried out the threading library why not and so next after around 10 queries the eleventh one will be painfully slow again I have no idea why then now this was in Python and so what I decided to do was maybe reprogram it for threading in Java and then have Python communicate with Java and so what I did is I learned job I the day because I hadn't ever touched that before because again once you went in programming basics it's really easy to move to another language and slipped in python there actually slipped in general is quite similar to Java except java's a little bit simpler and so yeah I learned drama today the next day I programmed in a simple relationship extraction threading module made a jar out of it and let Python communicate with the jar and so after that the glitch was mostly fixed it was just Python not threading properly or you could never got to the problem I was not able to find out what the problem was but I mean yeah so what kind of machine do you run he's like you driver the car multi-threading you got a lot of processors how many cores what kind of machine do you have on the attack what's your local host mic 27-inch 5k Retina iMac with 64 gigs of RAM and four cores I mean acre yeah four cores than hyper-threaded eight cores until I seven and that's good for you right now yeah you're happy with it yeah how about any external in the cloud any obviously SSD uh I don't actually I do have a wood set of course but then I don't really host anything online yet because I don't have a need for it yet but then what I'm going to make a send me public of course that I'm going to need a quite a powerful server get her to what so the industry needs your help have you thought about rewriting the Linux kernel actually I a few years ago I was I didn't really have anything to do so that's why I started YouTube but before that I actually I was really interested in operating systems i coded my little own with a hello world operating system assembly which could run on I forgot the architecture it runs on but it was quite interesting then again after that my youtube I started to take that more seriously and I didn't really have enough time to do that any projects you're working on now that excite you that you can share with us may be solving the speed of light problem actually mainly right now I've been working on as Tammy but I do have many other applications that I'm working on in an app that could help University students and developers with essentially it's an algorithm lookup if you'd like an algorithm that can help you do path finding for example you just put in path finding as a tag and some other things and then it'll give you a star dice other sort of algorithms and it uses the concept insights service and walks and I've also made a tweak classifier where you can say like let's say there's a hashtag on Twitter where there are two separate sort of things that you could talk about for example to hashtag Swift lang on Twitter at one Swift was open sourced it was there are two different types of people just talk about something general like nothing ever happened or they're talking about open sourcing let's say you wanted to see only news about Swift being open source well then you give Watson some examples of tweets that you like and sweets that you don't like and then eventually it would be able to tell you or give you tweets that you only you like it's a very hydration engine on context yes exactly an easy natural language classifier service so talk about social media I mean here at your age and what you've been through and what you know technically you have a good visit understanding of operating systems coding and all the principles of computer science but as it gets more complicated with social media people are all connected what's your view of the future going to be mean is it if Algrim is gonna solve the problem what do you think about the future how do you think about it 10 years out well first of all the world needs more programmers and I think more sort of algorithms and naturalizers processing are the means were the topics that we're going to focus on later have you ever been a Silicon Valley yes but it's so not not in a developer capacity in sort of visiting it would you like to sort of visit there yeah what does spend time with some of your your colleagues in the heart of development land John's out there your idols Steve Jobs Tim coke Bill Gates how about like I'm a software developer perspective any cult following people you love like some of the early guys coders any names that did pop to mind uh not the optimal might immediate jobs mo are you supposed in the orchestra are you running the orchestra he was a good product guy so if you can invent the product right now on the queue but would it be it would be mostly iron wrong sort of a QA system with almost a hundred percent accuracy that would be best in I state we have a hologram right here we have guests interface with us that would be cool how about that huh you are would you like to come to work for us and develop that we'd love to have you I like congratulate you on being the youngest ever cube alum we have this little community of cube you know alumni and you are the youngest ever so congratulations really fantastic a very impressive you know young man and really very separate you to all and congratulations thank thank you come on the Q things with spending the time this is the cube bringing you all the action here handmade doing some great stuff he's very young very fluent understands thread and understands coding and this is the future in a born in born in code that's that that's the future developers and we hope to see more great software developers come on the market the day to the analytics of course Watson's right there with you along the way things we come on the cube appreciate we right back with more cube coverage here exclusive coverage at IBM interconnect 2016 I'm John for what David love they be right back