Automation is a central component of most organisations’ digital transformation strategy today. While stakeholders at all levels are eager to reap the benefits of automation, synchronising, collaborating, and managing automation across all parallel automation initiatives is a significant challenge. If that sounds familiar, then your next step should be utilising an automation hub to manage the automation pipeline.

The case for business automation

Most business leaders today recognise that business automation, in all of its many forms, is not just a buzzword. In fact, it’s a genuine and influential part of digital transformation that helps businesses be more agile, faster, profitable, and competitive.

 

For many businesses, robotic process automation (RPA) is the embodiment of the promise of automation. RPA is the process of building, implementing, and deploying software bots that emulate human actions to automate repetitive, manual processes. However, other types of more advanced automation, especially intelligent automation (IA), are also gaining ground.

 

Most businesses today recognise the potential of automation. At least 53% have already started their RPA journey, and if the current trend continues, RPA adoption will be near-universal within five years. It’s easy to see why top performers in the implementation of RPA have seen a 4x ROI from their RPA investments, while the average business has experienced a ~2x ROI. What’s more, RPA benefits are most commonly felt in challenging yet increasingly vital business areas, such as compliance (38%) and productivity (27%).

 

It’s no wonder the potential economic impact of knowledge work automation is expected to be $5-7 trillion by 2025.

 

RPA, and other forms of automation, are vital because they help businesses operate more efficiently and do less with more. It’s estimated that 10-25% of employees spend their time on repetitive computer tasks, while IT departments spend 30% of their time on basic, low-level tasks. As a concrete example, businesses typically pay $5- $25 for manual invoice processing.

 

That’s a lot of waste in terms of time, money, and human resources. Today, 70-80% of these mundane, rule-based processes can be automated with trivial ease. As you can see, the problem lies less with being able to implement RPA solutions than with identifying the myriad opportunities for automation and managing the automation journey.

The challenge of affecting digital transformation through automation

The main problem for organisations looking to implement automation as part of their digital transformation is how broad it is. Most organisations have tens, if not hundreds, of potential use cases for RPA or other forms of BPA. Some are confined to specific teams or departments, while others are organisation-wide. Others may pertain only to a single enterprise app, while others span an entire tech stack.

 

There are so many types of business automation that it’s hard to track them all. For example, marketing automation, HR automation, accounting automation, process automation, and manufacturing automation, to name a few.

 

With so many potential opportunities for automation, the immediate problem is how to find and define automation use cases. This can be particularly challenging in large organisations with complex employee and managerial hierarchies. Understandably, C-suite executives may not be savvy to the immediate automation needs of ground-level manufacturing staff, for example, and vice versa.

 

So, the first problem to solve is the ability to create automation requests from both a top-down and bottom-up approach.

 

However, even when you identify a specific use case for automation, that opens up a whole other can of worms:

 

Where do you begin to implement all of these automation processes? How do you track your progress across all automation processes? How do you make sure all the relevant stakeholders are involved? How do you ensure compliance and collaboration to implement them efficiently and with minimal disruption? And, more importantly, how do you determine whether a specific automation process was successful?

 

Depending on the organisation’s size, digital maturity, and internal automation expertise, the lack of oversight can be a significant stumbling block on the road to large-scale automation. Clearly, organisations need some platform to centralise and manage the entire automation journey.

What is an automation hub?

The goal of an automation hub is to help streamline and accelerate the adoption of process automation initiatives. It facilitates every step of the journey of adopting a new automated process, from ideation to planning to implementation to validation. It allows all stakeholders, including end users, automation experts, developers, and decision-makers, to collaborate on the automation process.

 

We’ll cover everything that an automation hub does in-depth below, but it broadly consists of three main facets:

  • Collaborative process identification
  • Automation pipeline management
  • Process repository tools

 

In a way, these tools and features allow the automation of the automation adoption process. As the name suggests, it’s a one-stop, centralised, collaborative “hub” for managing all automation processes. It’s a single point of contact between all individuals involved in creating and using new automation initiatives. This includes business users (e.g., employees), developers, project managers, CoE (Center of Excellence) teams, and automation experts.

What does an automation hub do?

By looking at its actual capabilities, it may be easier to understand precisely what an automation hub does. While the range and depth of capabilities may differ from vendor to vendor and system to system, they generally offer the following essentials:

 

  • Process Identification: Allows users (managers, employees, dedicated automation staff) to share ideas or requests for automation via a collaborative process.

 

  • Pipeline Management: Map the entire roadmap and plan for a specific automation process. Define the expected cost, lead time, and benefits and track its progress in a single dashboard.

 

  • Process & Documentation Bank: Store all documents and assets related to a specific automation process candidate in a single, centralised repository.

 

  • Integration with Task Capture: Task capture tools streamline and improve communication between your automation experts and RPA developers. Automation or subject matter experts can specify best practices and suggestions as a process definition document or workflow diagram for developers to implement.

 

  • Marketplace: Establish an organisation-wide marketplace of reusable components in a private repository. Users can create, store, find, and install components on an as-needed basis at any place, any time, anywhere.

 

  • Gamified RPA Change Management: Support and motivate team members through the automation process using long-term engagement strategies. Clearly track progress and keep the focus on the next and most important milestones in the automation journey. Some gamification systems go as far as to allow you to implement points, badges, or ranking systems.

 

One important facet of most automation hub systems is that they encourage and facilitate collaboration through every step of the process. Users can share automation requests or ideas, action them, and provide feedback through voting systems or open-ended feedback mechanisms. The automation hub also maintains a single source of truth for all assets and information related to the automation process so that everyone is on the same page.

What are the benefits of an automation hub?

Everyone involved in the use, implementation, deployment, or effects of automated processes stands to benefit from the use of automation hubs:

 

  • Business users:
    • Discover, submit, and collaborate on automation ideas
    • Manage automation opportunities in one place
    • Share subject matter expertise to inform the automation process
    • Increase ROI with automation process prioritisation
    • Maximise the impact of internally developed automations
    • Leverage existing automations

 

  • CoE (Center of Excellence) leaders:
    • Identify what to automate as well as why, when, and how to automate it
    • Manage automation process pipelines
    • Ensure that automation is successful according to pre-determined metrics
    • Prove the positive impact of automation to leadership

 

  • Citizen developers:
    • Build automation with clear specifications in mind
    • Easily build and share personal time-saving automations
    • Ensure that you build CoE-approved automations
    • Easily kick off, manage, collaborate on, and deploy automation projects

 

The net result will be fewer headaches for your organisation when implementing automation initiatives. Not to mention deploying automation solutions that are fit for purpose and meet the objectives of your boots-on-the-ground employees and high-level decision-makers.

 

One of the greatest benefits of an Automation hub is the capability to store and re-use assets. Whilst this especially beneficial for multi stream test activities such as regression testing across multiple teams/projects, further benefit and efficiency gains can be obtained through the re-use of these assets in areas outside of traditional test activities.

 

These can include Robotic Process Automation (RPA), DevOps and environment operations, data generation and validation, and standards conformance validation to name some examples. The ability to store and re-use these assets can contribute to not only overall effort reduction but lead to significant cost savings as well as quality increase through standardisation. In addition, the storage of such assets can also enable greater velocity, in effect providing a mechanism enabling a ‘test on demand’ function.

 

The test automation tools market to date has been focussed on test automation in isolation, however with greater emphasis being placed on interoperability and re-use of assets to drive automation as an outcome, tools vendors are researching and developing mechanisms to enable holistic automation capabilities.

 

Traditionally this has been focussed at the integration layer, enabling diverse tools to ‘talk’ to each other, however UiPath (a recognised leader in RPA) has taken this further by focussing on Intelligent Automation as a whole of business enabler.

 

This has led to the market leading development of an integrated tool suite that enables Automation hubs to develop and share assets across activity streams – whether that is RPA, testing, or other forms of intelligent automation such as Intelligent Document Processing, Process mining and Task Capture. As UiPath state, ““Bill Gates used to talk at Microsoft about a computer in every home. I want a robot for every person.” Daniel Dines, CEO

Organisation Automation Potential

While the potential of implementing organisation-wide automation is nearly infinite, substantial obstacles exist. The best way to improve your chances of success is to rely on a proven digital transformation partner with experience in automation. This is especially true if you want to take automation to the next level by evolving toward intelligent automation.

 

If you are interested in learning more about our Intelligent Automation services, contact us for more information.

Sydney start-up Innovo has won a race against time to enable 21 small Australian banks to become compliant with the country’s new Open Banking rules.

The DevOps and digital development specialist was tasked with bringing the institutions in line with regulations of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s (ACCC) Consumer Data Right (CDR) rules before the deadline of 1 November.

Essentially, the rules cover the sharing of product reference data between banks in a standardised format to facilitate better product comparisons, according to the ACCC.

The 21 banks banded together to enlist Innovo after discovering the software platform provided for building out CDR capabilities was lacking a robust testing system to prove regulatory compliance.

For each individual bank to develop their own testing solution, it would be expensive, time-consuming, and potentially add risks.

Having missed the Phase One deadline of 1 July, the 21 banks had just four months to build their own testing software in order to meet the second phase deadline of 1 November.

Speaking to ARN, Innovo director Harold Bult explained that the challenge was to create a “smart solution” that would allow all the banks to test the platform independently, avoiding the time-consuming and manual processes that had hampered the Big Four banks in their initial testing phase last year.

“We used the test cases that the ACCC has put on their website and built them into an automated test solution that gives the banks the ability to run those tests in a relatively short time window,” he said.

In total, more than 90 people, mostly based off-shore, worked on the project, providing coding and development of the scripts.

The software solution is hosted on Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) EC2 and uses AWS Control Tower to manage multiple accounts.

Future operations will utilise additional AWS native services, leveraging both the cloud provider and the capabilities of AWS Premier Consulting partner Blazeclan.

Although the testing task may have seemed easier when completed with the first few banks, the Innovo team soon ran into difficulties when bringing the rest on board.

“In theory, everyone was thinking if it works for the two early adopters, then it will also work for the rest,” Bult said. “But it seemed a bit more complex than that, mostly from a coding perspective.

“We saw that the code is quite stable across the banks but needed to resolve varying configuration. Each bank has slightly different specific customisations in their environment.”

Bank of Victoria was one of the institutions to recently cross over the line and complete a successful test ahead of the November deadline.

Speaking to ARN, Bank of Victoria CIO Scott Wall explained that while the legislation of data sharing will be a “massive cost” to the company, the completion of the testing will enable them to start reaping some of the benefits.

“Now we can receive that data, which will probably be next year,” he said. “Then we can start developing new products and services ourselves.”

“Innovo was an untested partner for us,” he added. “But we signed up with them as they had a very clear-cut project plan, and they’ve certainly delivered. We’re very positive about that relationship and it was very collaborative.”

According to Innovo managing director Nick Finlayson, the testing solution will now be made available on AWS’ Marketplace, with potential for customers from across utilities to telecommunications to leverage it for their own CDR needs.

As of 1 November, all 21 banks have now passed the testing stage and can go live with their CDR capabilities, Finlayson told ARN.

“We shared the knowledge openly and did what was right for open banking and the CDR industry,” he added. “We spent over $1 million to build the solution just in development costs and yet we shared that, and each bank paid less than 10 percent of that to get the product and full compliance. We ensured they all got across the line. It was a true vendor and industry partnership.”

 

Eleanor Dickinson (ARN)

Sydney, 28th April 2021 – Blazeclan and Innovo, two leaders in consulting, technology services and digital transformation have formed a strategic alliance to take on the Australian IT services sector. With a core focus on delivering best-of-breed cloud enablement, technology integration and testing with a competitive pricing model, the partnership aims to usurp competitors in the sector.

 

The burgeoning cloud adoption market in Australia is powering businesses to add an extra $9.4 billion dollars to the economy with 45% of businesses in Australia using paid cloud technology. Enterprises increasingly need advanced digitisation to ensure their operations and competitiveness in a post-pandemic world, something that is facilitated by cloud technology.

 

The strategic alliance is spearheaded by ex-Capgemini heavyweights; Amit Bassi (Managing Director of Blazeclan ANZ), Nick Finlayson (Executive Director of Innovo Technology) and Paul Thorley (Chair of the Blazeclan/Innovo Strategic Alliance) who saw an opportunity to challenge the industry and take key market share from the major systems integrators.

 

“Australia’s adoption of cloud technology and services has been relatively slow compared to the rest of Asia Pacific. We’ve found that current cloud service providers are slow to implement, exorbitantly costly and miss the mark on building cloud cybersecurity resiliency,” says Nick Finlayson.

 

With a number of joint major customers including ANZ Bank, ACCC and Latitude Financial, the strategic alliance has proven to offer a different outcome to the status quo.

 

“Cloud services are defining new business models, facilitating a more innovative and dynamic way of driving digital experience, and are unlocking the next wave of modernisation,” comments Amit Bassi.

 

“We saw a huge opportunity to offer an end-to-end cloud enabled digital transformation service that starts from strategy through to agile delivery using the same one local team. This, in turn allows the customer to shift to a more dynamic and responsive way of running their business. We do this in a bespoke way, with one localised onshore team that is supported by an offshore team to take on enterprise sized projects, with a 24/7 operations.”

 

The strategic alliance will draw on the engineering manpower of over 500 technical experts located in Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland and Pune. Through the alliance, the team will also  tap into the collective expertise of subject matter experts in France, Belgium, North America and Canada to deliver advisory, engineering, assurance and managed services for digital, cloud and data platforms.

 

At their disposal will also be extensive partnerships and expertise on AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Azure that will support enterprise customers to build a cloud solution that adheres to data sovereignty compliances in the respective countries.

 

“Getting fast access to best-of-breed cloud solutions from the likes of AWS – of which Blazeclan is one of Asia Pacific’s most successful consulting partner – is a must-have for our customers,” comments Paul Thorley.

 

“We’re thrilled to, once again, be leading with a powerhouse alliance and cloud services offering that enables our customers to power to new heights.” He concludes.

Over the last six months, and with the challenges of activities during the covid period notwithstanding, Innovo has experienced a marked uptick in our client partners drive to innovate and reap the benefits of Digital Transformation and Cloud Migration.

Through these activities, we have identified that there are significant benefits in a focus on one of the key pillars of Digital Transformation – Tech Simplification.

The majority of businesses we have been fortunate to assist with have common challenges associated with their current state technology ecosystems; primarily related to overly complex IT systems and ecosystems that have developed organically over time:

  • multiple variations
  • multiple configurations
  • complex customisations beyond configuration
  • loss of technical knowledge and IP of time
  • multiple ‘like’ application sharing redundant/common functionality (e.g. communication, collaboration etc)
  • end of life technologies

The reason behind this increase in technical complexity are many and varied, but the common elements usually are related to:

  • a result of decisions around shifting business priorities
  • immediate need vs strategic view
  • governance or budget compromises
  • changes (customisation etc) to meet specific business needs and outcomes
  • increasing integration size as more applications and systems are implemented
  • lack of structure decommission analysis and implementation paths

Interestingly, complexity awareness within an organisation is usually greatest with IT streams, noting that there is little business awareness of these complex issues. However, once the business responsible areas of an organisation to become aware (for multiple reasons), these organisations generally look to Digital Transformation as a mechanism to try to stay relevant usually via:

  • new technology acquisition (increasing cost effect and complexity), or
  • look to simplify across people, process & tools (technical simplification and cost reduction)
  • Note: at Innovo we see that both elements mentioned above can be valid when approached holistically, with a strong IT simplification strategy and related plans in place

Speaking specifically to technical simplification, the key goals are to reduce cost, increase agility, reduces complexity, and enable ease of change. When considering tech simplification, several elements need to be considered:

Identify the Tech simplification drivers for your organisation, and develop plans accordingly:

  • Increase focus on business and client outcomes
  • Minimise change impacts
  • Increase transparency of technology complexity and technical debt, across whole or organisation
  • Increase productivity
  • Reduce duplication/multi redundancy costs (e.g. identifying and reducing the number of collaboration/communication tools/systems etc)
  • Improve BI/analytics and metrics measurement
  • Improve agility & innovation
  • Minimise costs across operations, change events, personnel, technology costs

Once you have identified what your goals and drivers are, what should you do?:

  • Baseline your current technical ecosystem – undertake a baselining assessment, utilising well understood and structured techniques and methods. e.g. 6R assessment (Rehost, Re platform, Refactor/Rearchitect, Repurchase, Retire, Retain)
  • Focus on a top-down driven, future goals and vision centric, holistic approach:
    • Organisational strategy, people/process/technology, invest in more than technology (e.g. focus on capability increase across people/process/technology)
    • Make simplification a mantra, enable processes whereby simplification is a key consideration for all future change decisions
    • Beware of inherent bias – asking the people who are invested in a specific technology or process to suddenly adapt and change can be problematic, leverage partners/independents
  • Baseline TCO, apply ROI for all considerations:
    • Be mindful of cost out first’ vs ‘strategic enablement’ – sometimes need to increase initial spending/increase ROI term is required to meet your future vision
    • Be mindful of existing contractual relationship, in particular, multi-year with termination/penalty clauses…identify these up front!
  • Focus on transformation as a journey, not a one-off. Build-in continuous evaluation
  • Drive collaboration & culture, do not just focus on technical change in isolation

At Innovo, we take great pride in having assisted our client partners in achieving their Digital Transformation, and specifically their technical simplification goals. We would invite any organisation that is interested in knowing more about this subject and interested in embarking on this journey to reach out to us to organise a time to discuss.

With the prevalence of available agile methods and techniques, increasing numbers of organisations are looking to adopt agility into their work practices – a trend that has been increasing over the last several years, and as reported in publications including the World Quality Report.

With this, there are obvious and apparent challenges being observed, not least of which is the apparent increase in hybridisation approaches – a confluency of waterfall whole of organisation with incremental introduction of agile practices. Whilst this may appear to be a ‘best way forward’ approach to transition, in particular for larger organisations, without careful planning and executive-level (i.e. top-down) stakeholder commitment to whole of business change, what you can end up with is the worst of both worlds.

One major area of concern that Innovo consistent observes is the prevalence of misconceptions around agility and perceived benefits. Agile, for better or worse, has now become a marketable (and therefor a marketing and selling) term, with corresponding issues with the substance of what is actually being offered. The term ‘Agile’ has almost become a doctrinarian term, sparking arguments between methods and models in absence of underlying analysis of best fit and needs for an organisation.

The lack of in-depth understanding of Agile, and the prevalent misconceptions on what Agile is, does, and delivers, can lead to significant impacts.

Putting aside the minutiae of process activities, Agile at its heart needs to be thought of as a different approach to delivering organisational outcomes. A few points to note include:

· You still need to plan and document – planning is critical to Agile; the primary difference in the Agile approach is for less ‘up-front’ plans and documents, and increased focus on incremental

· Agile is not inherently “faster” than other methods per se – however, you can obtain an increased velocity through its utilisation of continuous communication & feedback loops…in effect being more efficient

· Agile can be utilised for more than just I.T.

· A major mindset change is required in adjusting from traditional top-down command & control structures to that of Agile self-organisation…getting the balance right on this is critical for Agile success

· Get help. Really! When considering embarking on Agile you need to be aware of the effects this will have for the whole of your organisation. This needs to be planned just like any major transformational exercise and having partners who have undertaken this before successfully can make all the difference to the level of Agile adoption success.

 

It’s certainly very interesting times for Banking in Australia (and globally).

The Banks are dealing with increasing levels of Regulation and Compliance (thanks in part to the Banking Royal Commission). This compliance is the operating cost of a Banking Licence, and the bigger the bank the bigger the cost of ensuring compliance, thanks mostly to the size and complexity (and legacy) of their operations (non-compliance is becoming much more expensive also as the regulators assert their authority and as the politics of the day dictate).

Disruptive technology is continuing to change how the Banks serve customers, how they improve their internal efficiencies and reduce their cost-to-serve ratio and in turn, how they compete with new entrants/Fintechs (like the emerging neo-banks Volt, 86 400, Xinja, Up and Judo).

And then comes along Open Banking, where Regulation, Consumer Demand/Expectations and Financial Services Technology are colliding to create a perfect storm. Depending upon your point of view, you might see Open Banking as a positive step for Consumers and a good opportunity for challengers to eat into the market share of the incumbents, or you might see it as a threat to the four-pillar strategy that will slowly eat away at our very stable banking establishment which has been protected in Australia for decades.

Whichever way you see it, it’s Law now and the ACCC and the Big4 have been working away for 18months to get it kicked started (officially on the 1st July without too much fanfare and no Bang!). The remainder of Australia’s banks have until the 1st July 2021 to become compliant Accredited Data Holders (holders of consumer data/accounts/transactions).

The opening up of the banking services market means that Accredited parties (those that apply to become Accredited Data Recipients and then get approved/registered) can then offer banking services to the market using the Consumer Data received from the Data Holders (Banks) where the Consumer has given their Consent.

So far there have only been two organisations Accredited to be Data Recipients (ADR) being Frollo and Regional Australia Bank but we expect there to be many many more in the coming 12 months. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out and what services emerge in this competitive landscape.

For an existing bank/ADI to survive in this brave new world there are two key things to manage carefully;
• Complying with this new legislated regulation is not an option. It will be expensive if you get this wrong with large penalties hanging overhead, and even more costly is the potential Brand damage and loss of business.

• Competing in a new world where innovation is driven/demanded by Consumer demand (which is heavily influenced by Google/Facebook/Apple/Amazon). New innovative ways to engage with and serve customers, new and innovative products created through the integration of multiple specialist providers combining their unique offerings together to create products and services that appeal to certain market segments.
So, getting this right is critical, and yet not simple, however it opens up exciting opportunities for consumers and for the Financial Services providers who execute well and fast.

This is why innovo has developed the CDR Conformance Platform (CCP) which underpins the CDR Conformance Managed Service. Our CCP enables any bank (large or small) to automate your conformance validation as you develop your Open Banking infrastructure (shortening development times) and to assist you in your Compliance process as you are ready to go live and then on a continuing basis as is required by the regulation.

Reducing your Risk and Cost of Compliance is critical so that you can focus on your customers and continuing to invest in innovation and spend less on managing the process and tools involved in maintaining continuous conformance and compliance.

One of the most important elements of a DevOps team is collaboration, it’s what the culture is built on to ensure continuity and integration across teams and workplace applications. The importance of collaboration has only been exacerbated by the current global pandemic of COVID-19 and need to work remotely.

 

As the impact of COVID-19 continues to infiltrate through our lives, the IT landscape is drastically shifting timelines around DevOps and cloud based projects to support the increase of remote working environments. Businesses will not be able to stay afloat without looking at their cloud strategy as a matter of urgency, if they haven’t already.

 

DevOps is becoming more critical within the overall IT strategy to ensure employees and developers are well versed in staying up and running and connected to their teams for productivity purposes. Everything that we offer at Innovo Technology Services is in line with supporting a remote working enterprise, this is our area of expertise when it comes to leveraging DevOps within an organisation.

 

There are specific ways that you can build strength and cohesion whilst teams work remotely with DevOps, here is some insight that we have gathered and recommend:

 

If you think about very large and dispersed teams across a global organisation with tens of thousands of employees all working together, the luxury of being in the same room to plan and meet goals, was never there, even prior to COVID-19. There could be critical team members that an enterprise relies on and this could be a mix of direct employees and outsourced associates, and therefore, requiring the use of different applications and platforms.

 

These kind of organisations have no choice but to streamline communication and automation across software applications, to ensure productivity leads to successful results. This is the mindset shift that is required now that we are working within a remote and online workforce. Everyone that is employed, or employing staff within an enterprise must think about the bigger picture if they are to stay afloat.

 

DevOps, by nature, assists teams to become collaborative and flexible and able to adapt to a changing work environment as and when is needed. Remote and agile DevOps delivery can streamline disparate projects and workflows effortlessly once implementation is in place and integration is rolled out.

 

The remote working method, in conjunction with DevOps, can prepare a team and global enterprise for instilling an agile culture and although the initial implementation may cause some headaches, this will result in less bottlenecks and blocks in processes and KPI measurement. Teams will stop being reliant on particular key players because visibility to projects becomes easier with DevOps in place. Applications like Slack allow teams to work smoothly with set timelines and dates, because they understand where a project is at and are privy to where a human resource may be falling behind or human error has come into play. Improved automation encourages enhancements in the communication chain for all parties within an organisation.

 

Part of the reason organisations are finding this time challenging is that DevOps hasn’t yet been prioritised, due to other more essential projects taking the front seat. The avoidance of remote working cohesion, collaboration and communication will lead to some short term pain in our current global situation. The good news is companies like Innovo Technology Solutions can help with the implementation of DevOps projects for remote working conditions to improve the circumstances over the mid-long term. We don’t know how long we will be experiencing a global pandemic like COVID-19, it is recommended that DevOps, continuous integration and continuous delivery get addressed with key stakeholders as soon as possible to not only support the business to survive, but to also support the wellbeing of employees so they can do their job without the extra complexity.

 

Sticking with old ways and traditional methods of workplace communication could present another issue for enterprises. Physically meeting with your team in order to understand key projects deliverables, propagates a DevOps ‘anti-pattern’, which legitimises the need for face time with key players within the enterprise or management team. This creates a bottleneck for bigger decisions to be made and removes the ability to measure productivity because KPI’s are not accurate. This is obviously a managerial concern, but something to consider as you prioritise your upcoming projects and automation considerations.

 

Remote working can be of significant benefit to employers and employees when it comes to cost, productivity and quality of life or work/life balance. Having regular check in points and/or meetings that are set on the calendar bi-monthly or quarterly can ensure the continuity of business practices and gets the team used to being present for the cadence of measuring results and setting new goals collaboratively.

 

There are a myriad of tools to support remote workers like Zoom, Slack, G-suite, GitHub and more, that can help you to execute a collaborative strategy with DevOps, more easily. Having check in and productivity meetings, via tools like Zoom, is a great way to ensure you can see the faces of your employees and engage with them in a more personalised way. Keeping your employees present and in full attendance can assist with the collaboration that is required to successfully rollout new DevOps standards.

 

Before COVID-19, it has been recommendation to over-communicate to employees to keep them engaged in the remote working environment, however this is something to carefully consider given the influx of information your employees are receiving during this global crisis. Keeping consistent with communication on collaboration tools like Slack, could be a great way for staff to feel engaged when they are logged onto these platforms. It is a time to consider how many applications are required for a workforce to run efficiently, and to make redundant any that are creating ‘white noise’ that dilutes the messages you want your employees to receive and action.

 

Download our latest CIO guide to DevOps for remote working environments.

With COVID-19 and the Australian bushfires creating a myriad of challenges for enterprises across our country, the importance of DevOps, continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD), has risen significantly. Australian firms are finding ways to ensure the stability and continuity of a remote working economy, to mitigate risk and uncertainty. Many firms are swiftly realising that old, clunky ways of operating are not going to cut it whilst most employees within enterprises are forced to stay home.

Projects that wouldn’t usually get a lot of air time are now moving to the top of the list as many businesses prioritise continuous integration and continuous delivery solutions (CI/CD) within the DevOps realm.

Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) puts in place a structured set of operating principles that allow development teams to distribute code alterations more often and with more reliability, sometimes referred to as ‘CI/CD pipeline’.

Like many elements within an IT environment, most software applications and dedicated teams are required to develop code across multiple platforms, however what is required is an integrated method to make changes quickly whilst having them validated almost instantly, without the need to draw on extra resources.

The goal with continuous integration is to create automated structure that allows for quality of software and collaboration across varying applications. In order to get to this seamless place you need teams committed to making code changes more often, and for employees to make that a priority, you need seamless integration when it comes to building, packaging and testing applications.

A sophisticated CI/CD DevOps practice would have the capability of deploying to production on a consistent cadence of daily or even hourly, bearing in mind that continuous delivery may not be possible at this rate for every business application. Many organisations however, are not at this level of sophistication with the reality being that they are still testing software on premise and behind the firewall.

The installed base may still remain in a data centre, and when developers are working in the office and within the firewall, this is manageable. However in a remote working environment, this proves to be complex because access to the VPN can become an issue. There’s no guarantees access will be there, which creates instability in work flows.

Now, as a matter of urgency, companies across Australia (and the globe), are making the necessary changes to shift workloads to a more comprehensive CI/CD process. The time to push out these projects simply must be condensed to respond to the organisational changes created by COVID-19.

Almost all companies should be finding ways to enable apps to be cloud enabled as soon as possible, it’s a matter of survival. DevOps teams will be busy providing companies with solutions to get to CI/CD in a stable way.

It’s not all doom and gloom, many successful organisations are demonstrating the efficiency of DevOps within the organisation during this global pandemic.  Cloud Infrastructure solutions have made it possible in this COVID-19 initiation, for Software-as-a-Service providers to efficiently and swiftly scale operations. There are examples where AWS has been able to ‘spin up’ tens of thousands of instances rapidly and then to pull them down immediately after, in a seamless fashion. Some enterprises, like AWS, are well prepared for this.

The global economy and shift to the corporate landscape has shifted so rapidly, that organisations will either sink or swim. Innovation is required to keep afloat during these times, and the clear rise in online customer usage with companies going remote and in some cases, exclusively remote, means many enterprises are making the most of cloud-native application development.

Continuous delivery (CD) is a strategy that allows DevOps teams to encourage smooth operations within an enterprise software team, and therefore, a more positive remote work environment.

The rise of importance of DevOps will continue to lessen the complexity and inefficiency of this remote-working time and investing in this way is worth considering for the effective productivity of your software applications. To put it simply, if people are happier in their remote-working environment, business can run more smoothly and DevOps, CI and CD can assist with that.

Many organisations are finding that cloud-based projects forecasted for next year, are now moving forward for completion in next three months. This dramatic shift in deadlines, calls for continuous integration and continuous delivery, perhaps more now than ever. This is the time for DevOps services to rise up to the challenge, to support the continuity and survival of businesses across Australia.

To learn more, download our CEO’s GUIDE TO CONNECTING REMOTE TEAMS WITH DEVOPS

Sydney, June 10th   Innovo Technology Solutions, a testing and software development consultancy, has today announced its exclusive release of their CDR Conformance Platform (CCP) in advance of the Product Reference Data go-live implementation of the Australian CDR rules and standards. The tool, a fully automated conformance platform allows banks and Third-Party Providers (TPPs) to quickly verify its APIs and other requirements are Open Banking and CDR compliant with the published rules and standards as defined by ACCC, Data61 and the Australian legislation. Innovo’s platform facilitates fast-tracking the launch of open banking services for both Product Reference Data (PRD) and Consumer data. For all ADIs, PRD is mandated to go-live in 3 phases commencing 1 November 2020.  Consumer data is scheduled to go-live in 2 phases commencing  1 July 2021.

 

With an architecture that supports both Data Holders and Data Recipients via its virtual banking module, test harness, api library and conformance reporting module, CCP can be configured to support Open Banking and other industry verticals when mandated in future legislation.

CCP enables automation and customisation of the end to end testing process, thereby creating a conformance validation for current and future scopes, regulations and standards.  Complete with its conformance reporting , and dashboards, the platform coupled with the Innovo service affords banks a cost effective and significant accelerator to meeting its compliance obligations.

 

The Innovo CCP supports conformance validation in-line with the ACCC rules for Consumer Data Rights and Open banking . Legislated in 2018, the Consumer Data Right is designed to give consumers the right to safely access data about them, held by businesses, and direct this information be transferred to trusted third parties of their choice. It will first be adopted in financial services where it is known as open banking.

The Innovo team is at work already incorporating additional industry verticals and evolving standards into the API library, including upcoming legislation  to include the Telco, Utility and Healthcare sectors. Fully customisable and user-friendly, the tool enables technology teams to quickly test APIs in-line with CDR legislation, specific needs, and business requirements.

“Simply put, any organisation who participates in the Open Banking ecosystem is obliged to comply and must prove that they meet the standards” comments Nick Finlayson, founder of Innovo.

“Realising and assuring ongoing industry compliance can be costly and time consuming. Harnessing the power of the Innovo CCP platform, we will enable stakeholders to deliver proof of compliance quickly and cost-effectively for the present and future requirements.  This is a significant enablement tool for banks and participating 3rd Parties  to meet accreditation criteria under the ACCC mandates. ”

With a team of over 50 technology specialists across Australia and overseas, the Innovo team has facilitated major advances in software development and testing across multiple verticals. The team develops and incorporates the latest and most innovative technology in their projects, leveraging its DevOps methodology and agile practises.

 

ABOUT INNOVO TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS:

 

Innovo has increased its presence in the software development and testing industry across Australia and New Zealand since early 2015 with a focus on providing best-of-breed technology delivered by expert Testing, DevOps and IT consultancy professionals. Innovo’s people bring deep sector-focused knowledge to client projects, to help them mitigate risks, lower total cost of operations and open up revenue streams out of their technology investments. Innovo’s agile methodologies and technology partnerships can connect customers to provide on-demand technology solutions with deep expertise and trusted delivery.

 

www.innovotech.com

 

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