The Technology Strategy - Using Storytelling and Networks to Increase Customer Impact (Part 3)

In the third blog of this four-part interview series, Aislinn McBride, our Digital Services Chief Technology Officer, in Conversation with Sophie Fullerton, discusses the impact of networks and storytelling and looks at how the voice of our people impacts globally.

At Kainos we enjoy a challenge, solving complex digital problems and delivering innovative solutions. Our problem solving culture is enhanced through collaboration. We are much stronger when we learn from each-other's ideas. We enable this learning via our story telling and networking communities.

Through our storytelling and networking, we provide customers with insights from across the globe from our 2,920 people, using skills across a vast range of capabilities, bringing previously solved problems to the fore, and helping our customers benefit from our experiences.

To enable our people to consistently deliver with quality we focus on how we share our global experience with the wider Kainos team. This is particularly important as we continue to grow across the UK, Ireland, the USA, and Poland, delivering projects across the public, health, and commercial sectors, and as we continue to extend our capabilities in Intelligent Automation, Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cloud, Cyber Security, and Engineering. By providing this scale of insight to our customers, we deliver better outcomes that ultimately benefit them.

How does it all work?

Kainos’s communities are groups of individuals and volunteers, with a common interest or passion. Our communities act as forums for storytelling, providing thought leadership, learning opportunities and to challenge how we work.

Our communities are set up based on the challenges our customers are facing and the technologies we identify as being potentially impactful. Often these are created based on top-down organisational need, but communities can come from within teams. There is a level of fluidity in this structure that helps us react faster to changing customer demands and technologies.

Forming a network is how we are more deliberate across those communities, ensuring they have the support that is needed, connecting the dots across the organisation and amplifying stories and individuals to have a wider impact. That may be between communities, across customers, or across organisational structures. We created a diagram to help our team understand this.

Stories flow through this network, helping bring insights to the team and customers who get most value from them. These are published in various formats, such as live discussion sessions, written stories, recordings, and the blog posts you can see on our website.

You talked about the culture in Kainos, how does this pillar impact culture?

Culture is very difficult to describe, it cannot be easily defined, but we can influence how it feels to work in Kainos. The storytelling and networks approach we are talking about here is a great example. Individuals are encouraged to share all versions of their stories; including challenges faced and lessons learnt, as well as the successes achieved. This style of sharing helps create a positive environment, it makes learning enjoyable, making it easier to remember stories and more likely that they will be recalled in a time of need.

This same idea is reflected in our communities, where we apply an open by default approach, where all stories can be heard, and where publishing with imperfections is encouraged. This supports a level of diversity and inclusion; with more voices heard, the quality of our impact increases. The connections that individuals form through these engagements are incredibly powerful; they help everyone be part of something bigger than themselves.

How do people external to Kainos see this?

We have a strong network internally but engaging our stories in wider platforms should not be undervalued. Wider engagement allows others to benefit from our knowledge and helps our team understand the uniqueness of the Kainos team.

We work closely with our strategic technology partners, Microsoft, and AWS, and have the pleasure of frequently presenting on their stages, using the platform to broaden our engagement. We are an active participant in Microsoft’s Partner Advisory Councils for AI and for Cloud Native. This gives us the opportunity to help them understand our customers and gives our team invaluable experience on the global stage. The stories our team share have led to our Cloud Practice lead, Gareth Workman, now chairing the Cloud Leadership Committee for Tech UK. 

We actively encourage our team to publish their stories and engage in forums. Some recent stories our team have shared include our Principal Delivery Manager, Gillian Armour, discussing the impact technology had in helping the people of Northern Ireland fight back against COVID-19.  

Sharing our stories helps to generate discussion and engagement. A great example of this was at the BelTech technology conference in April 2022. Our team excelled at the event. One of our Lead Software Engineers, Catherine Paul, gave a crowd-pleasing presentation on API versioning. Our Principal Architect, Stuart Malcolm, and Principal Delivery Manager, Catherine Hawthorne, gave a superb overview on our involvement of the Defra EU exit programme.

Giving our people these opportunities to tell their stories on bigger stages helps broaden their impact while being part of a thriving global community.

What impact does this have on Kainos customers?

The focus of sharing our stories is always to make an impact on customers.  Our networks help us connect the dots between successes in one customer and create opportunities for another. A great example of this on a large scale has been our conversations with Digital Health and Care Wales. They wanted to create an application to support citizen patient engagement, and thanks to our work with NHSD on the NHS App we have been able to propose that this platform can be reused and adapted for Digital Health and Care Wales. This has saved significant costs after years of development was invested in the NHS App.

Although this is example is on a larger scale, we are always looking for opportunities to positively benefit our customers.

Our stories are all about the 'so what?’ impact. We love to learn and share our knowledge, but it is only sustainable if it is targeted at solving problems for customers.

Our people and their voices are fundamental to the innovative services we deliver for our customers. Through giving our people the opportunities to work on interesting projects we help them create the stories that will generate discussion and engagement and amplify their voices in a thriving global market.