Compliance, low-code, and the user as hero: highlights from Drata's podcast

2023-03-09T00:00:00-05:00

I joined Helina Medhin and Arlo Guthrie (Drata's Director of Design) on Compliance Uncomplicated to talk about PixieBrix — how low-code can democratize software customization, where humans still beat computers, and why we went after SOC 2 early.

A few highlights from the episode:

On democratizing customization

You should be able to customize it to your needs, even if you aren't a programmer or a software developer.

On software as a representation of knowledge

[Software is] a representation of human knowledge about how the world works. When you build tools for analyzing software or creating software, you're actually deepening your understanding of the world and how to create things within that. And then, when you start running analyses or synthesizing, you're actually also creating new knowledge as you go.

On humans vs. computers (and AI)

Humans and computers have different strengths. Humans are very good at framing problems, navigating ambiguity, relationship building, whereas computers are good at rote memory, solving large computations. [...] [Computers are efficient at] rapidly synthesizing information from different sources to create new information. But they still need that interplay with humans to really drive outcome.

On user experience

Make the user the hero of the story. [...] To really empower them to be the hero of their own [story] — help themselves out and help their team members out.

On compliance

Compliance is about agreeing to do important things and then keeping your word. [...] [We wanted to be] communicating our compliance and controls in a way that our customers, and IT departments were already familiar with. [...] It's really about keeping our word, and then also communicating that in a way that's simple and makes sense to our customers.