Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 14 | Page 46

CIO opinion What we see is that a product that would have taken more than 18 months to get to the market is available to customers in less time. This means that if your product was to fail, it will also fail early saving you resources that would have further gone into the project. Why you should automate your delivery cycle Having the right technology is critical in helping companies achieve high agility in their product delivery. It is almost impossible to achieve high quality and a competitive time to market with manual testing and deployment. “ IT CAN BE CHALLENGING TO DEFINE WHAT DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION MEANS FOR A BUSINESS AND THE KEY BUSINESS GOALS IT SHOULD ACHIEVE. Modernising your product lifecycle Empowerment of product owners should be accompanied by a shift in product management. Previously, firms have preferred end-to-end development of a 46 INTELLIGENTCIO A fully automated development cycle following continuous integration and continuous delivery/deployment approach (CI/CD), a micro-service architecture and a well-defined cloud strategy facilitate growth of successful products while also making it possible to do away with failed products almost instantly. Data driven insight over human instinct product with all features, followed by a big customer launch. The challenge with this approach is if your product does not meet the needs of your customer. This is often discovered way too late, months or even years later after a lot of time, money and resources have gone into the product. A better approach would be to involve the customer early in product development. The Agile Methodology allows for exactly such an approach. After a product vision has been established, it is then broken down into high level features with Minimum Viable Product (MVP) defined. Development then involves prototyping and deploying an MVP, followed by collection of customer feedback and incorporating this into the next iteration until the entire product is complete. At Safaricom, we deployed this approach with some of our digital products – Masoko and Safaricom App. The app, for example, first launched with key data and voice services, followed by an update that included key M-PESA features, with the third iteration bringing additional M-PESA features and M-PESA financial services. The last ingredient to consider for successful digital transformation is data analytics. We have previously relied on leadership capabilities and experience for decision making. We are, however, at an age where the world is transiting from purely relying on human insight to data driven insight. The shift to data-led insight not only requires organisations to deploy machine learning and deep learning, but to also shift to a culture where they can trust insights derived from data just as we trust our instincts. This transition can easily be achieved by focusing KPIs around decision making. It is also important to emphasise that data is now becoming a firm’s most important assets ahead of physical assets or even technology itself. With these six ingredients in place, any organisation should be in pole position to make a success of their digital transformation journey. The capacity to build your own minimum viable product driven by the six aspects here makes you likely to succeed and be fit for the future. n www.intelligentcio.com