Key takeaways from our Leeds Digital Festival webinars

In this blog, we summarise the key takeaway messages shared from each of our three webinars as part of Leeds Digital Festival.

As Executive Sponsors of Leeds Digital Festival, we adapted to the disruption caused by COVID-19 by transforming our three physical events into virtual ones. We felt it was important to continue learning and developing over this time, and our tenacious event hosts swiftly adjusted their talks into new online formats.

Here are the key takeaways from each webinar:

Preparing your tech for cloud turbulence

Marius Rubin (CTO) and Rob Merrett (Managing Consultant) discussed the challenges facing organisations that cannot currently move to public cloud and how they can optimise existing on-premise assets in a cloud native way, making the eventual jump to public cloud less of a challenge.  

For many of the businesses we work with, preparing for the cloud is about becoming future-ready, being able to move faster, more reliably and with increased pace of innovation. Our top tips on how to best approach this are: 

1. Front run the ways of working and architectures - people, process and technology aspects are inseparable; it is hard to have empowered ways of working without technologies that enable programmatic, delegated control. You need to also ensure that your processes are streamlined, centred around your people and governed in a way that supports value being delivered as fast as possible.   

2. Control, traceability, repeatability – empowerment should be underpinned by control, traceability, and repeatability that modern deployment and operations tools give you. "The 12 Factor App" methodology provides principles supporting modern application development for cloud, and how you can apply them to on-premise solutions as well.

3. Portability - applications and systems need to be as portable as possible and best fit the cloud environment in which they will be deployed. There are tools and technologies that allow for modernisation of infrastructure, storage and deployment patterns which abstract from legacy infrastructure concerns while continuing to sweat your existing investments on-premises.

4. Start the journey to agility early - it is possible to increase the agility in teams and technology by adopting an agile mindset and methodology to ease the path to cloud and start to focus on value driven delivery: it pays to start the journey early on the right path. Watch the full webinar:

Going for gold: Implementing business strategy at pace

Marcus Hall (Principal) and Will Try (Managing Consultant) discussed how companies can keep up with their competition in the race to successfully implement change, be it technical or business, in a world with increasingly short cycles for response. Based on our experience of complex IT transformations, the top tips on how to land change at pace are: 

1. Clear strategy and vision to define success – it is essential to have a well-defined strategy and vision that is aligned to future direction. When doing this, it’s critical to separate what’s important from what may previously have had merit, but no longer fits with the direction. 

2. Business architecture – you need to map out how you’ll achieve the step-changes in order to cut through and make plans that are deliverable. By doing this, you understand what needs to change, why it needs to change and a sensible order of priorities in which to make these changes. 

3. Change capability - having the capability to successfully lead change and embed it into the organisation will ultimately determine whether you succeed. Preparing stakeholders in good time helps them to become effective and get maximum benefit to achieve your strategy.

4. Change responsiveness and adaptability – implementing change in strategy quickly is difficult. However, organisations that can pivot and respond to challenges quickly differentiate themselves from their former peers and break through into new markets, build better customer relationships and achieve the outcomes they require. Watch the full webinar:

Operational analytics – Identifying the good, the bad and the ugly

Mark Atterbury (Managing Consultant) and Tom Smith (Managing Consultant) spoke about how DataOps provides you with a way to build more resilient capabilities to manage data pipelines and analytics products at scale. However, doing so should be done with the following important considerations:

1. Avoid complexity as a priority;

2. Differentiate your strategy to develop services that support insight generation compared to production data pipelines;

3. Reduce personas for service consumption down and consolidate security, data privacy and quality responsibilities;

4. Empower teams with the guardrails to operate (not just build) data products effectively;

5. The ability to change products in the future should be your measure of success, rather than your ability to deploy. Watch the full webinar:

If you had any follow-up questions based on our webinar content, get in touch below and we'll pass them on to the relevant Credera expert.