The Technology Strategy - Delivering Continuous Improvement and Technical Excellence (Part 1)
As CTO, one of Aislinn’s key focuses is to set and keep the Digital Services Technology Strategy on track. The Technology Strategy has three core pillars:
In the first of this four-part interview series, discover the importance of the Digital Services Technology Strategy and find out about the continuous improvement and technical excellence pillar.
Why is continuous improvement important in technology today?
We believe by focusing deliberately on continuous improvement, it enables our people to thrive and deliver to a consistently high standard.
How we delivered software as recently as five years ago has changed fundamentally to how we deliver it today. We have gone from on premise, to containers in the cloud, and now aggressive adoption of a host of cloud native services. The maturity and accessibility of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has radically changed enabling many more challenges to be addressed through AI. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is another space that has expanded and consolidated, with both the tech, and the types of problems it is being used for, changing.
Quality is at the heart of our how we deliver. We can only deliver quality through a deep understanding of the technologies we are working with, such as those above, this requires continuous improvement. It is our ability to get robust, resilient, and sustainable services live that our customers love and that makes a tangible impact on their outcomes. This is why 88% of our digital services work is from returning customers.
How will you drive this continuous improvement?
At its heart it is embedding and sustaining a pervasive culture of continuous improvement; embracing diversity and inclusion through a variety of initiatives. Communities are central to this; we grow communities based on organisation drivers as well as from grass roots up. Our communities are deliberately bridged across a wider network to ensure we maximise their impact.
It is important Kainos continues to be a vibrant place for individual growth as this inspires a continuous improvement mindset. For example, for those joining us at the start of their careers our 18-month programme of learning sets them on a continuous improvement path from the outset. Across our wider team, we invest in learning through key partners like Microsoft, AWS, and UiPath with inspiring joint events, investment in certifications, and opportunities to attend conferences around the world.
We recognise our scale means we need to deliberately share ideas and knowledge. We have created a range of mechanisms to ensure our insights are broadcast widely and used to inform decision making with our customers.
How does continuous improvement benefit the Kainos staff delivering these projects?
Embedding continuous improvement helps all our staff grow and have interesting career journeys. We can see this in the great stories of mobility across the organisation, where people move from data engineer to business development, from business analyst to engineer, as well as those that move from graduate to organisational leaders.
Is there an example when investment in continuous improvement and technical excellence has benefited a customer?
We have many, but there is one example I love sharing. A new customer came to us recently with a challenging problem, their service, newly migrated to the cloud was slow, unreliable, and expensive. One batch job (job 1) was taking 25 hours to run, and another (job 2) was taking 49 minutes.
Our team unpicked the technology solution and identified changes quickly. Job 1 was reduced to 11 seconds, job 2 was reduced to 11 minutes, and the costs were reduced by 87% per job. Subsequently the team created automated pipelines to help the customer accelerate future migrations enabling them to identify and mitigate reliability issues.
The customer was amazed and now continues to work with Kainos on their wider cloud journey. The Kainos cloud technology practice made this possible due to their depth of knowledge and ability to optimise the cloud.
In the next 12 months, how important do you see continuous improvement and technical excellence helping to deliver the Technology Strategy?
Post COVID-19, while we talk about a new normal, the world is still in constant change. Customers need to develop and pivot at pace, they need quick and deep intelligence, and they need secure user focused services. At the forefront of expected challenges for customers are sustainability and ethics while being cost effective. As part of our continuous improvement and technical excellence approach we will continue to develop across these themes and more. This focus will help continue our mission to be technology thought leaders; proving, adopting, and scaling new technology and approaches to deliver better outcomes for our customers.
Closing
Kainos is continuing to invest in an industry-leading group of thought-provoking technology explorers by empowering them to grow and continuously improve. The impact of continuous investment in our people is felt heavily with our customers. Continuous investment in our people leads to our customers having access to a more knowledgeable set of highly skilled people, excited for the future of technology.