Customer-centric approach
The new motto of "focusing on the customer" is expanding by the day. Until a few years ago, it was the manager who decided on new IT projects within a company. This approach has evolved towards asking the company's users what they expect from IT. However, in order to be future-proof, you need to go even further than that. Your future customers will be generation Z, who were born with the digital gene. Without exception, they all want to work and live the digital way. You therefore need to find out how your customers want to use digital technology and how you can make sure your business meets their requirements.
Time-to-market needs to be faster, and faster, and faster…
Speed is of the essence, because disruptive competition is never far away these days. To reduce your solutions' time-to-market, you may need to approach your projects in a completely different way from what you are used to. Budgets need to be approved more quickly and you need a team that can quickly write the requirements, distinguish between the essential and the trivial, anticipate your customers' changing needs and make ad-hoc adjustments to the requirements based on market changes. You need an IT environment that supports this quick way of working.
An IT environment offering such a high level of flexibility is not always easy to integrate into an existing company. Collaboration models that go well beyond traditional IT outsourcing, such as software factories, have teams on stand-by to initiate projects with you. They are multifunctional platforms that allow your experts to work with the provider's experts to investigate, analyze and implement ideas. At the Realdolmen Project Factory (also: Realdolmen DevOps Factory), for example, we form a multidisciplinary team with you. This team isolates itself for two days to develop a concept, design a wireframe and create digital assets. We strive for the structural integration of the business and IT. Such a platform professionalizes software development, tooling, methodology and coaching. The methodology's focus on versatility – agile, kanban and scrum – significantly reduces your time-to-market by means of short iterations.
Creation of needs
One of the main advantages of an advanced collaboration platform is that you can rely on support from the very inception of an idea. This means that you may create a need that did not exist before.
Take Uber, for example. Most people were not exactly waiting for a taxi company to make use of their neighbor's car. Until one day, someone played with the idea to make available all those cars in all those garages to society. In order to develop such an idea, you need technological support: a database of available cars, a phone system, an online reservations platform... The creator of Uber searched and found their technological platform and today, there is customer potential with a real need for an Uber taxi.
The digitized customers of tomorrow are already thinking much more quickly than ever before. Their needs are changing with the evolution of technology. If you want to respond to this as a company, you need to be strong enough to be able to experiment with your ideas. A collaboration model such as the Realdolmen DevOps Factory offers your business a platform for trying an idea and investigating what is and is not possible with prototypes and small sprints. Together, we will shape your ideas further and convert them into successful projects.
Do not leave your ideas in dreamland, and start creating the next new need now to make your business grow.
If you want to realize a certain idea, or if you would like more information on the Realdolmen DevOps Factory, do not hesitate to contact Roel De Cuyper, Realdolmen DevOps Factory Manager, at roel.decuyper@realdolmen.com.