Building good software is dependent on the interaction between the people building it. It’s about the methods and tools smoothing the communication, but most of all it’s about the soft skills of the people and trust in the team. Developers, designers, business people and stakeholders need to be involved at appropriate times to make the software fly for the long term.
I have written about trust and close relationships at work before and I was thrilled to find myself talking about the topic again at the Total Telecom Congress in Amsterdam in November. What triggered this, was that I was able to share the stage with a long-term colleague and friend Leevi Kokko from 8-bit-sheep. Our topic was Unified digital identity and how it can boost business benefits and customer experience. When structuring the presentation we soon concluded that it’s important to talk about how crucial are the people in making the digital transformation.
We are doing a big renewal at Elisa with digital identity and login solutions. There is a bunch of tech stack involved like a German SaaS solution CidaaS, Kubernetes, Kafka etc. But the online services around Elisa don’t have to mind the complexity of the tech stack. We use open ID connect and standard protocols and have built good developer guidelines so that it is easy for the services to be taken into use. There are very clear customer benefits with just the new login, and at the same time, we can push other renewals on the side like implementing common identifiers, breaking silos, creating business benefits, and so on.
The presentation had four themes, the first being the customer focus. At Elisa, we have a large number of services, varying from webshops to streaming services, cyber, security and community services. Many services are for both B2C and B2B covering all from SME to large enterprises. That’s why it’s important to understand the customer across all the services and channels to produce a personalised customer experience, and for that, we need the renewal. This comes close also to the second theme we had about breaking silos whether they be B2B and B2C, organisations, services or different tech solutions.
We wanted to understand thoroughly the business needs and benefits when starting this renewal, and this was the third theme of the presentation. We wanted to have stakeholders very much involved, and that’s why we did over 70 interviews to understand what benefits could come from this. We did a requirements capture to understand the complexity of what is needed, and to ensure solid funding with clear business benefits. Enhancing customer experience, sales and marketing were the most important areas of benefits, but also simplifying the IT architecture, speeding up the time-to-market in service development, and improving customer service.
The last theme was about how to make a change with people. I believe in strong emotions and I use often big words, so in this case it’s very appropriate to talk about supporting the change with love towards the people involved. Management-buy-in is very important to ensure business benefits and solid funding. It requires vision, strategy, listening to management’s needs and good storytelling to convince them and to keep them on track since this type of huge change takes time. Stakeholder and key-person involvement is as important, we need to have systematic sharing and empathy in understanding the complexity of business systems, architecture, design and future development.
Most important is of course the team who does the actual development and implementation. I feel super lucky that I can work with the talented and nice people in the Elisa ID and ECC teams. Team excellence comes with the right people, being up close and personal with the team members, experimenting, being agile and providing purpose. Also empowering other people and other teams in this joint effort is very much needed. To share the enthusiasm with personal contacts and not with huge workshops. All of the interactions and different groups need a lot of love and then great things will happen. This type of digital identity renewal is a great tool to supercharge your digital transformation with the people around you.
Total Telecom Congress offered a good overview which are the current topics with telecom development and business implications, so it was very nice to be part of that. I was also a panellist in a conversation about customer loyalty, and it was super interesting to hear the views of the panellist Richard Davis from Ofcom and our host Michael Dargue from Cartesian, and also the questions and points coming from the audience. Thank you Total Telecom Congress for inviting me and for the many interesting encounters and conversations!
Small experiments and inspiration 