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