The Technology Strategy -Enabling a Culture of Technology Explorers and Delivering Progressive Technology (Part 2)

This is about deliberately exploring emerging technology. It is an exciting space to engage within, understanding the art of the possible and determining new ways of approaching problems; with the ultimate success being the impact for customers.

Technology explorers for us is not about one person, it is about the collective, it is the culture in the organisation. We actively support our team to think more broadly, amplifying their curiosity about technology and their customer domain, and to use it to think innovatively.

We find it important to recognise and reward our team for the value they bring through this; for example, providing opportunities for training, conferences, and storytelling. This is helped by our strong partnerships with Microsoft, AWS, and UiPath; we invest time and funding to provide our people with the badges (certifications) that recognise their hard work.

Through early engagement with our customers we identify opportunities for our technology explorers to put their learning and innovative ideas into practice. It is one thing to promote a technology exploration culture, but it is putting it into practice and helping the team see the value it builds that really retains interest and grows to a bigger impact.

By promoting technology exploration, we are more likely to identify where progressive technology can make a real impact, this is part of our filter criteria for the technology we explore. That impact can be on the quality or reach of a service, the longer-term value of what Is delivered, impact on the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) agenda or cost reduction.

The insights we produce are often created in conjunction with our customers, as well as fed into our engagements. This enables our customers to confidently adopt progressive technology with real impact beyond proof of concept or throwaway work.

The technology adoption landscape fundamentally changed through COVID-19. Remote working, education, fast decision making at scale, and digital adoption to the extreme all impacted the technology we worked with. Research is telling us we will see many of these trends continue, albeit not all at the same pace as we have seen through COVID-19. McKinsey reported organisations are now three times more likely to say at least 80% of their customer interactions are digital and indicated organisations are implementing solutions within days or weeks, rather than months.[1]

Moving beyond COVID-19, I think there are at least three key changes likely to stay with us:

1. Improved ways of working have reduced the gap between technology and business. There is a greater focus on delivering value early and often and the organisational decision-making changes which are needed to make that happen.
2. Adoption of Cloud technology supporting access to great technology, accelerated development, and cost management.
3. Deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology as part of everyday services to deliver more effective and efficient outcomes.

We have many great customer success stories, but the story below highlights how Kainos’ thought-leading technology explorers have delivered progressive technology for our customers through strategic partnerships with AWS and Microsoft.

A really great example is in our work with an engineering company. We worked with the engineering specialists to optimise the efficiency of advanced cutting machinery for creating metal components. Sensors on each machine provided us with a reading every second and we developed an engineering platform to ingest the data in real time using Azure PaaS services for IoT solutions. The solution enabled real time decision making based on the efficiency of advanced cutting machinery for creating metal components, using IoT sensors, data visualisation and bespoke AI Models, all with the help of Azure. Ultimately, we helped enable the company to optimise the use of machines to increase their output through real-time insights on the workload amongst the machines to maximize the time machines are productive.

Every time we deliver a solution, our people are at the heart of it. It is their innovative and thought leading ideas that continue to make the delivery of progressive technology possible in Kainos, alongside our strategic relationships with key platform providers. 

At Kainos, customers are at the heart of our mission and our technology strategy. By enabling our people to be real technology explorers, using our key strategic partnerships, and pushing the boundaries of what is possible, we are continuously delivering progressive technology solutions to overcome complex customer problems.