How do you bring your technology along with a growing and changing business?

McKinsey Global Institute research suggests at least 30% of business activities in 60% of all occupations can now be automated. However, some IT teams are still in the past with only 29% of businesses thinking their IT team is critical to business success, with a much greater emphasis placed on risk reduction.

Technology is impacting and changing everyone’s personal lives a huge amount and with that, the expectations of business applications is growing at pace. These expectations are helping drive businesses desire for change and deliver efficiencies at pace and improvements in employee engagement.

“The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow” – Rupert Murdock

Technology teams need to move out of the basement and become part of the wider business teams to bring success. It is only once the business is experienced that problems can be appreciated and improvements can be witnessed. Within Oxygen we have found that insourcing our technology teams has brought high levels of understanding, appreciation and alignment which is showing benefits.

“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do” – Steve Jobs

Having the right technology team is a key element to delivering success. Regardless of role, we have found that each member of a technology team:

• Needs an appetite to deliver change
• Must be a master in their field
• Should be approachable and want to interact with others throughout the business
• Must understand the operating business well

Once the right people are in the right place, the whole business adopting a way of working which embraces change, focusses on moving forward and has feedback loops really brings everything together.

If you want to innovate, you have to iterate!

Implementing change at pace is highly facilitated by modern software processes and platforms. In Oxygen, implementing agile development processes has brought structure to this and a structure which the wider-business is now aligned to. On top of this test automation and continuous integration have been key elements to accelerating the time between development and production, ensuring that time is spent appropriately on change acceptance rather than repeating the same test scripts on each change which are now automated.

In a modern and quickly changing world, all of the above is far from a done deal once implemented and it is key that focus is maintained the pace of change by any business. This includes focussing on technology trends, machine-learning, cloud services and the wider technology landscape ensure everything is being done to lead and adopt. Change is ongoing, embrace it!

Rob Parker – Chief Technology Officer