Building your own skills and capability for digital transformation

In a field full of giant IT ser­vice providers and sys­tems inte­gra­tors, a young British com­pa­ny, Con­ti­no, is offer­ing a nim­ble and dis­rup­tive way of deliv­er­ing agile and dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion.

What sets Con­ti­no apart is how it works with large enter­pris­es and organ­i­sa­tions to build capa­bil­i­ty and skills, not only mod­ernising their soft­ware and tech­nol­o­gy plat­forms but also their inter­nal process­es and cul­ture to be lean­er, more vibrant and entre­pre­neur­ial.

Co-founder and chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer Ben­jamin Woot­ton believes the tra­di­tion­al enter­prise struc­ture of out­sourc­ing tech­nol­o­gy to big providers has cre­at­ed a lega­cy of slow and bureau­crat­ic process­es, which are poor­ly suit­ed to the mod­ern pace of tech­no­log­i­cal change.

“In many large organ­i­sa­tions there is enor­mous waste and bureau­cra­cy. Our research has shown that IT func­tions are often up to 40 per cent too large for what they need to achieve. They should instead move towards a small­er pool of more high­ly skilled peo­ple and focus on the appli­ca­tions and dig­i­tal expe­ri­ences that dif­fer­en­ti­ate them from the com­pe­ti­tion,” he says.

“The prob­lem is that the exist­ing mod­el has left many com­pa­nies with­out the skills to deliv­er new dig­i­tal prod­ucts and trans­for­ma­tion­al change. They are instead reliant on big lega­cy con­trac­tors that are not equipped to push through change at a rapid pace.”

Tech­nol­o­gy is devel­op­ing so fero­cious­ly fast that the old mod­el of work­ing – tak­ing one or two years to deliv­er a large trans­for­ma­tion project – has become obso­lete.

Contino’s propo­si­tion is to focus on deliv­er­ing trans­for­ma­tion through small light­house projects that act as a bea­con for its capa­bil­i­ties, such as devel­op­ing new mobile and web appli­ca­tions that can be deliv­ered in short deliv­ery cycles of up to 12 weeks, pro­vid­ing an imme­di­ate and tan­gi­ble ben­e­fit for the client busi­ness and its cus­tomers. These small wins are then mul­ti­plied to sow the seed of trans­for­ma­tion from the ground up.

The firm employs mod­els such as DevOps, agile soft­ware devel­op­ment, con­tin­u­ous deliv­ery, microser­vice archi­tec­ture and the adop­tion of cloud plat­forms, such as Ama­zon Web Ser­vices, to deliv­er on these trans­for­ma­tion ini­tia­tives suc­cess­ful­ly.

An inte­gral part of Contino’s approach is to encour­age and enable cul­tur­al change with­in clients’ organ­i­sa­tions, many of which have become risk averse and focused on effi­cien­cy and cost-con­trol over speed, agili­ty and inno­va­tion. It does this by embed­ding a small team in the busi­ness, and then builds on that by draw­ing from many dif­fer­ent busi­ness areas and not just the IT depart­ment, in a more cross-func­tion­al mod­el.

Contino’s propo­si­tion is to focus on deliv­er­ing trans­for­ma­tion through small light­house projects that act as a bea­con for its capa­bil­i­ties

Mr Woot­ton says those “blend­ed teams”, made up of IT devel­op­ers, engi­neers and testers, as well as peo­ple from else­where in the busi­ness, ben­e­fit not just from the exper­tise of his peo­ple but also an envi­ron­ment where the cross-pol­li­na­tion of ideas and entre­pre­neur­ial think­ing is encour­aged.

He explains: “A lot of IT providers want to work remote­ly from their off­shore ser­vice cen­tres, but we do almost all our work on site with cus­tomers because we are look­ing to dri­ve cul­tur­al change and to stand shoul­der to shoul­der with them through new process change as well as deliv­er­ing strate­gic tech­nol­o­gy ini­tia­tives.”

Although Con­ti­no works across a broad spread of indus­tries, includ­ing tele­coms, media, retail and the pub­lic sec­tor, a grow­ing area of focus is reg­u­lat­ed indus­tries, par­tic­u­lar­ly finan­cial ser­vices such as bank­ing and insur­ance.

Ben Saun­ders, head of the firm’s finan­cial ser­vices prac­tice, says: “Reg­u­lat­ed indus­tries face a num­ber of chal­lenges because they need to move quick­ly and build bet­ter dig­i­tal expe­ri­ences, but they are held back by reg­u­la­to­ry and her­itage tech­nol­o­gy con­straints.

“We can help cus­tomers through that by demys­ti­fy­ing and mak­ing sense of their tech­nol­o­gy, allow­ing those mono­lith­ic and anti­quat­ed IT sys­tems to become more effi­cient so they can get prod­uct to mar­ket a lot quick­er in the midst of the dis­rup­tion they face.”

Once seen as the pio­neers of tech­nol­o­gy and excit­ing places for soft­ware engi­neers to work, banks have been left ham­strung by the finan­cial cri­sis and sad­dled with creak­ing tech­nol­o­gy stacks.

One of the ben­e­fits of a col­lab­o­ra­tive way of work­ing is it breaks down the iner­tia that builds up in organ­i­sa­tions and shows they can become cen­tres of engi­neer­ing excel­lence where a vibrant cul­ture can thrive.

Mr Saun­ders adds: “Not only does that res­onate with staff, but it also makes the brand some­thing peo­ple and oth­er organ­i­sa­tions want to be asso­ci­at­ed with, through the val­ue our changes intro­duce.”

Con­ti­no was set up in 2014 by Mr Woot­ton and Matt Farmer, who spot­ted a gap in the mar­ket after work­ing with large enter­pris­es and see­ing how dif­fi­cult it was to get new appli­ca­tions and fea­tures deployed to mar­ket.

With $30 mil­lion of ven­ture-cap­i­tal back­ing, the com­pa­ny quick­ly estab­lished itself a rep­u­ta­tion as a trust­ed part­ner with large enter­pris­es and it now has offices in Lon­don, New York and Mel­bourne. It has more than 100 dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion and engi­neer­ing spe­cial­ists, and plans to dou­ble in size in 2017.

Mr Farmer says: “There was a huge hunger for an opin­ion­at­ed part­ner to help clients with agile and dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion at scale, and a gap for some­one to come togeth­er with the high-cal­i­bre engi­neer­ing skills and a new approach to dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion focused on capa­bil­i­ty build­ing.

“We’ve come a long way in a short space of time with what we think is a dis­rup­tive mod­el for help­ing our clients to adopt new tools, tech­niques and approach­es. That’s been proven suc­cess­ful by the take-up across the globe with some very large and admired brands.”

Mr Woot­ton con­cludes:  “We’re a very mis­sion-dri­ven com­pa­ny. Our moti­va­tion is to remove waste and bureau­cra­cy, and tak­ing the tools and approach­es star­tups are lever­ag­ing to help enter­prise increase deliv­ery speed. These mod­ern approach­es are bet­ter for our clients, bet­ter for their peo­ple to work with­in and ulti­mate­ly bet­ter for the economies in which we work if these famous brands man­age to rein­vent them­selves to be the dis­rup­tors instead of the dis­rupt­ed.”

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it https://contino.io/