Digital transformation is highly prized but poorly understood. While more than two-thirds (69%) of directors[1] want their organisations to accelerate digital business initiatives, as many as 80% of IT leaders fail[2] when they try and change their organisations for the better.
The reason for failure is often a lack of alignment between IT and business leaders[3]. Too many digital transformation projects still focus on changing back-end systems at the expense of involving line-of-business managers in the development of front-end services.
The best way to deliver digital transformation success, suggests Joe Soule, CTO at Capital One Europe, is to build Agile, cross-business teams that work to build creative solutions to customer challenges.
SEE: Guide to Becoming a Digital Transformation Champion[4] (TechRepublic Premium)
At Capital One, Soule has helped the bank move away from legacy ways of working and towards an investment in software engineering capability and Agile methodologies. It's a long-term rebalancing act that has seen the company adopt close-knit development teams with clear and concise deliverables.
"Changing little and often is now a reality for this organisation," he says. "That change is the mark of the difference between large, monolithic Waterfall delivery of implementations to open-source software, delivered incrementally in feature form on existing products. We've converted most of our IT spending on assets into people. That's been a stellar story."
Back in 2014, there were 30 engineers – most of them infrastructure engineers – working for Capital One Europe. Today, there's as many as 300 engineers in the UK business alone. The vast majority are software engineers, compared to just a few six years ago.
Soule says this transformation to Agile working has had a "game-changing" impact on the delivery of applications to customers. In the