2020 Vision

 

Marie O'Connor

Practice and Portfolio Director, Sogeti Ireland

 

 

I’m responsible for leading and developing the key Lines of Business that Sogeti Ireland operates in: Digital Assurance & Testing, Digital Services, Analytics and Cognitive Services, and Consulting Services. At Sogeti Ireland, we believe these key areas clearly reflect the digital world in which we all now live and work.

Digital is driving the speed of evolution in today’s corporate environments; creating new approaches to business, product testing and the methodologies that enable it. However, whilst this acceleration is happening, we must always remember that our people are at the heart of change, and it is people who are my central focal point. That’s why we ask how we can help our clients use technology to engender employee happiness in the workplace, through improved collaboration, greater productivity, and the ability for people to work the way they want to work. And can we, at Sogeti Ireland, use new technologies on our own transformation journey to support professional development and knowledge sharing?

This is all part of an evolving technology journey. For me, the biggest step change in my career has been the evolution of smartphones – apps only really came into existence in 2008! When I started out, I had the luxury of longer lead times, although I probably didn’t see it as a luxury then. That’s all changed. Nowadays, if an app on a smartphone doesn’t live up to expectations, it is simply deleted. How you respond to the rapid market changes and look to create ‘stickiness’ with your customers in this environment has a significant impact on your success.

The speed at which new products and applications are released is being enabled by the likes of agile and DevOps. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and automation are now part of the mix, and their use will fundamentally increase over the coming years. We must keep asking – and importantly assisting our clients in questioning – how technology can enable faster time to market, while ensuring new products and services maintain quality and remain market relevant. We need to adopt a ‘fail fast and fail often’ approach as we aim for a Minimal Viable Product, or what is increasingly known at Sogeti as a Minimal Lovable Product (MLP).

This market relevance is an area that interests me, and one in which Sogeti’s new Thinkubator program will make a valuable contribution. Thinkubator is an opportunity for our clients to experiment with new developments in a safe, predictable fashion, using, for example, artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive automation to rapidly prototype a MVP. Looking ahead, greater use of AI, cognitive QA and intelligent testing will enable us to react and learn in a continuous cycle of improvement across both our own and our clients’ operations.