About the Guest

Dan spent 12 years in the military as a fighter jet mechanic before transitioning to a career in technology as a Software/DevOps Engineer/Manager. He's now the Chief Architect at the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. He's leading the technical and cultural transformation for the NAIC, a non-profit focused on consumer protection in the insurance industry. Dan is also an organizer of the DevOps KC Meetup and the DevOpsDays KC conference.

Links Referenced: 

• Insure U: created by the NAIC for consumer insurance education 
• Dan’s talk at DevOps Enterprise Summit 2018 
• State Ahead Strategic Plan from NAIC
• Explore technology proposals, fiscal budget proposals, etc. on the NAIC site 
• Dan’s website

Transcript

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Mike Julian: Hi folks. I'm Mike Julian, your host for the Real World DevOps podcast. I'm here with Dan Barker and the chief architect for the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. Welcome to the show Dan.

Dan Barker: Hi Mike, it's great to be here.

Mike Julian: So National Association of Insurance Commissioners, it's like the four least interesting words in one title I've ever heard. What in the world do you do?

Dan Barker: We thought if we combine them that it would be more interesting, that may not have had the intended effect. So the NAIC is a nonprofit, about 150 years old. We kind of got our start organizing events for insurance regulators, so primarily the chief insurance regulators for each state and territory and we organize events to get them together. And we also created model law. Over time, as technology advanced, we started to host some centralized technologies within the NAIC and providing a lot of the back-end applications that regulators use. We also offer something called Insure U, where you can go and learn about insurance, all kinds of insurance, I'm sure that it will get flooded now.

Mike Julian: Because we're all chomping at the bit about insurance.

Dan Barker: Yeah. And so we still do a lot of the event planning, taking regulators and kind of informing them on technology. There's a big movement in Insure-Tech with tons of investment right now. And so we're trying to make sure everyone is staying up to date with things like blockchain, AI, a lot of the data-focused stuff particularly around unconscious bias and the data and how to clean that out. So we're a pretty diverse group and we have a lot of kind of different focuses but one of those is the technology side and I'm the chief architect and leading up a lot of the technological transformation as we move to Amazon Web Services, moving everything to the cloud and moving to some more open source tools and trying to move towards a DevOps culture.

Mike Julian: That sounds like a pretty fascinating situation.

Dan Barker: Yeah, it's really exciting. We have all kinds of new tools and new things. We're moving towards ... This company has done a pretty good job of standard blocking and tackling actually, what you might be surprised at in a nonprofit.

Mike Julian: Right.

Dan Barker: One of the only companies I've ever even heard of that had one version of Java and that has been-

Mike Julian: That's pretty impressive.

Dan Barker: Yes, I continue to ask in every meeting if that's true, and-

Mike Julian: Are you sure?

Dan Barker: Yeah. I'm sure there's one somewhere around here. But yeah, for all of our applications, they're all on the same version of Java and it's up to date to you know, like Java 4.

Mike Julian That's pretty impressive, congratulations.

Dan Barker: Yeah, so it's a great base to start on. And it's been a great journey so far. I've been here for a year and the CTO that kind of came in to start this off has been here for, I think about three years. So it's about the length of the transformation so far.

Mike Julian: Okay. So we're talking about transformation here. You actually gave a talk about this at DevOps Enterprise Summit in Vegas earlier this year, or 2018. What was the problem that started this entire transformation process? What were you trying to solve?

Dan Barker: So, we had several different opportunities that we were looking to kind of utilize moving forward. So we have this infrastructure that has been ... We're a nonprofit, so we don't have a ton of funding and it's been a bit challenging. So we haven't been able to move as efficiently because we haven't optimized a lot of our technological systems, much of what we have has been more by request, kind of an IT department within a company, non-technical company. And so we're trying to move towards being more of a technology company which requires a little bit more proactive planning. So one of those areas we're trying to gain some efficiencies, gain some efficiencies across all the different teams. So trying to standardize a lot of our [inaudible 00:06:30] me...